


The Last Stark of Wintefell

by Noral_Covic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV), Game of Thrones RPF
Genre: Arya and Gendry are the main relationship, F/M, the battle for the long night, the season seven leaks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-12-01
Packaged: 2018-11-15 14:37:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11233062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noral_Covic/pseuds/Noral_Covic
Summary: ‘Winter is coming’ are the Stark words,’ one Riverlands man mocked.‘Have been since Brendan the Builder raised the Wall,’ a drunk man agreed. 'But winter is here now.'‘They should change it then, I reckon,’ the bitter Riverlands man went on darkly.‘Who should?’ asked the drunk one. ‘All the Starks are dead, but the Bastard, and the Beauty, who wed Bolton and Lannister, so she’s arguably not even a Stark anymore I suppose. Or the North would have crowned her, not Ned Stark’s Watch beholden Bastard. The Starks are dead.’‘Exactly. The new House words of Stark I propose are these: I did the right thing, and they killed me for it.’To which Arya had risen, looked both men straight square in the eye, and said: ‘All men must die.’'So,' says Arya Stark to herself, as she rises once again, 'let us do right while we still draw breath.'***Chapter five is finally done. Started on Six. Hope to get that done before y'all give up on me***





	1. All Men Die, So Live Well

**Author's Note:**

> I basically wanted to write out how I think Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire is heading/how I think (not how I want...because I want Jon Snow to live!!!!) the show will end, based on the leaks. And I am focusing on Arya and Gendry because I've loved them since the books, and Jon because he's the best. 
> 
> Since I just youtube the shows and I haven't read the books in a long time please correct me if I miss anything by dropping a comment. This is my first Game of Thrones fic so please if you like encourage me to keep going. I do plan to write it all the way to the end of the battle of for the long night, if people like it. Also, let me know if I am total crap so I know not to waste my or anybody else's time;).
> 
> The plot as conceived thus far is...Gendry wound up in King's Landing where he's smithing under an alias after rowing a lot. Arya has decided that all men must die, so she is going to try to assassinate Cersei to speed that all up. Daenarys will land in Westeros. Jon will be Jon. Sansa will be left with Littlefinger...then the Hound will show up because who doesn't love the Hound? Ser Davos will be on a secret mission to King's Landing, and there he will meet Gendry again, and Gendry will meet Arya. 
> 
> I relate a lot personally to book Arya (don't ask) so I guess you could say Gendry and Jon are my book crushes, and I always kinda hated Sansa. But TV series Sansa is someone I could forgive and like. And I ship Arya and Gendry because they're impossible really, but I think I get them in a way other fans haven't written them yet? If that makes sense? To me Arya and Gendry are bound by the hell they've been through, bound as survivors, and they're not crushing on each other from the point the show and books left them, but they both know they have a closeness that no one who wasn't there with them through the hell of Harrenhal would ever understand. Gendry got that the world wouldn't accept that closeness between a Lord's daughter and a Blacksmith, and he accepts his state in life, while Arya wants to go back to the past or fight for the future, but finds the present impossible. Anyways, rambling. 
> 
> So yeah Chapter one will be a little slow going but it will get going soon, I swear. Let me know what you think:). Please. Pretty please.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gendry contemplates his life choices thus far while rowing back to King's Landing. Having arrived there safely, he makes plans to sell the boat, and start a new life under an alias.
> 
> Four years pass, and Arya is faceless, at a RIverlands tavern, listening for the news. She makes a decision to head South, to assassinate Cersei Lannister.

 

**GENDRY**

**(In the channel, in a boat, trying to get to King’s Landing…still rowing)**

 

For the hundred thousandth time he curses himself… _Never trust a highborn!_

Gendry Waters, as it turns out, is not so fond of water---at least not the sea water for which bastards born on his native King’s Landing are named. Ironic, that just a tip of a wave and the name he has loathed most of his life may very well, at the last, go over his head with ease.

Gendry cannot swim. There are no public baths such as those that exist in the Free Cities in King’s Landing. The harbour shallows, when the tide goes out, are rank with the raw sewage.

 _Because of that shit, and other shit that comes of being low-born, and orphaned with no one, I did not learn a great many things I’d likely have done well at, like swimming_ , Gendry supposes.

Gendry supposes so without investing any great feeling into the supposition. Thus doing, Gendry makes himself instantly more likeable than a great many other young men would manage in his position. A man at ease with his place in the world is always more likable than a man who thinks he deserves less than he’s got, or a man who thinks he deserves more than he’s been given. This, Gendry has always known. He has also always known that his life is worth nothing to the nobles who run the seven Kingdoms. He hadn’t ever bothered to figure it, but it would have to have been something like greater than one in a hundred thousand odds that someone born in Fleabottom like him, would capture the notice of any one royal, like a King or a Queen.

 _My luck, eh_ , Gendry smiles magnanimously to himself while he rows. For anyone born landless and untitled, to not get caught up in bloody highborn games played out for thrones, power and crowns, was an obvious prayer in life. The only way those born dirt or street common could play was through bleeding, fighting, killing, or dying under the banners of, or in the names of highborn folk.

 _But when she’d spoken_ …Gendry had to blame what had to be his father’s highborn blood, because when the beautiful sorceress--- _the double-crossing bitch_ \---drew castles in his mind’s eye, and spoke of his name and blood as if it were a power in its own right, he’d been swayed. He’d wanted to play. What little boy born to nothing much, and no one important, does not dream of being important, chosen, and special?

And what young man doesn’t dream of a woman on fire, with secrets burning in the darkness, who asks nothing of him, but simply chooses him? When such a woman is the most beautiful sort of woman, in a wicked, blasphemous sort of way, and she’s clothed in thin red silk and rubies, or wearing naught but her flaming tresses and the candlelight and the shadows dancing on the walls, what man, content with his lot in life before someone ever spoke of crowns and castles and kingsblood, would ask for more?

 _…Or why?_ Gendry groans.

It is his second day of rowing. Gendry’s smith hands are already callous and worn, so the oars have not made blistering work of them, but he’d already gone on through the night. In the darkness, Gendry almost felt terrified that Melisandre could summon sea monsters or worse. It was practical, however, to put as much space between his former gaolers and himself as possible.

That’s what Gendry told himself until the light of the second morning.

In the pale grey light of day, Gendry doubts that a bastard like himself warrants the King’s brother to send men or ships after him, being that most of Stannis’ fleet is already notoriously lost.

 _Stannis…My Uncle…_ Gendry broods, rubbing his wrists. _Who wanted to burn me alive for her demon God of Fire and Blood. No_ , Gendry has no Uncle. This, he decides, being sure that Uncles don’t burn their nephews alive. _Not even their bastard nephews_.

 _…I never had a father either, and I turned out fine_ , Gendry warrants. _And, from what I’ve seen of castle men, I’m a better man than any Knight or Lord, so maybe having a family means nothing in the end, towards what kind of person a man becomes._

That line of thinking brings his mind back to Arry.

‘ _I’ll be your family_ ,’ she’d said.

Ar _ya_ \---he has to force the correction upon himself. _Arya Stark_.

Arya Stark was a highborn just like the rest of them, under the dirt, forgoing the poorly shorn hair of her disguise. She gave orders, and expected him to follow them.

Arya Stark had never trusted Melisandre, or the Brotherhood Without Banners.

 _What a fool I was_ , Gendry thinks. _I should have gone with the girl, made her brother some swords. He’s fighting a war after all. That means there’s work. And knowing Arya, she’d have lied_. Gendry sighs heavily. He almost puts his face into his hands but he remembers the oars at the last second, and jumps. Gendry sits up and rows more surely, while continuing to brood. _Would have said I saved her life or some bloody shite, so that her brother would have given me a good start. Highborn have a care after their own. I’d have been a castle smith, had my own forge. I could have been what I am_. Gendry continues that line of thought bitterly.

...And the truth of that is why he could never have gone.

 _Arya can’t be other than who—and what---she is._ Of that, Gendry is certain. That’s why he’d liked her so much.

Arya Stark was probably home now, reunited with her family, making good on her plans of revenge, living in some Northern Castle. She might be in a dress. Someone might have forced her to brush her hair out, like the Brotherhood had, when they’d learned they could trade her.

The thought amuses Gendry who tells himself he sees her like a little sister…although the realization that follows does not.

It was never that Gendry had doubted Arya’s word, for she’d vowed to take them out of Harrenhal and had. She’d vowed to keep his secret, and would have to the point of being buggered on a pike or gnashed through the belly with rats. She’d have been tickled to death for it without ever breathing a word.

That, Gendry knew, knew beyond knowing anything else he knew or had ever known, made it impossible to chase after her.

And it made absolutely no difference that he’d have done the exact same thing for her, and had indeed come closer to it.

When it came down to it, their short stay in hell in Harrenhal had left Gendry Waters and Arya Stark on more intimate terms than pissing in front of one another, or huddling in a wretched heap for warmth or comfort. It made them closer than lovers, closer than blood. It was the steely light in one another’s eyes that had kept each other sane through the ordeal, and nothing would be able to change that. No one who hadn’t been there would understand. Years, distance, situation in life, and it would simply take meeting one another’s eye to know they’d always be together in their nightmares.

That’s all that bound them, and nothing else.

Well, nothing else but a little girl’s desperately lonely roadside promise to a boy who had no right beyond shared nightmares to accept such a promise.

Although it had hurt like hell to hear her call him stupid, tell him he was just a stupid blacksmith boy, Gendry had been honest. He had corrected Arya Stark, as the world eventually would:

_'No. You would be m’lady.’_

Gendry had assumed Arya Stark hated him then.

 _'You’re just a stupid blacksmith, boy,’_ the wolf girl had taunted, before getting up on her horse and looking down on him. Even as a hostage of the Brotherhood, the skinny, dirty little girl could be ridiculously commanding, and all it took was for her to up her nose at him, to make Gendry feel as low as dirt.

But when the Brotherhood had sold him to Melisandre she had cried after him, fighting for him when he’d been too stupid to realize he was going to his death.

 _Arry must have realized I’d never have abandoned her, unless it was for her own good,_ Gendry tries, for the seventieth time, to reassure himself. But the truth is he doesn’t know what Arya Stark thinks, or feels, or if she even cares anymore.

She’d felt betrayed, that he knew, but if they ever saw on another again, which Gendry also has to allow, is unlikely, would she punch him in the gut, pretend she never knew him, or do whatever a happy Arya Stark would do when she’s happy?

Gendry had had little enough experience with a world in which Arya Stark was able to be happy, so he has no idea what that would look like. Thus wondering, Gendry cannot, for the life of him, tell which frightens him more: the thought of Arya Stark being happy that he is alive, or that she’ll look right past him like she never knew him, as cold as ice. A kick in the gut or a knee in the groin, that Gendry can allow himself to imagine. Anything beyond that…

 _'No matter how thirsty you are, don’t drink seawater,’_ Ser Davos had warned him when the other man had helped him shove off at Dragonstone, helping him escape.

Ser Davos was a good sort, but he’d been born in Fleabottom too. Arya Stark had only been good to him because the world hadn’t had a chance to mould her yet. She was still a child. _That’s why she can be so bloody brave_ , Gendry knows. _It’s easy for a person to brave when they don’t know what’s out there yet…Or when they have nothing left to lose._

Gendry wasn’t sure if he had much more than his life left to lose.

Not that he’d been born to much.

He’d never even been given his father’s name, let alone any help from that lecherous lout. _What kind of man can win battles against Kings who once rode dragons, and then ride off, abandoning his responsibilities, and die in a hunting accident?_ Gendry wonders of his father.

The man had been a famous drunk, and a lecher, and a once famous warrior, but none of that meant anything to Gendry.

 _I’ll swear off arbour gold, until my dying day,_ Gendry vows. _Wine and women obviously go to my head. I’ll make swords, and shod horses, but I won’t ride them, or take up arms myself, so I’ll keep my head. If anyone offers me a goblet or a throne, I’ll turn them down. No matter how thirsty and ignorant I am, as I told Ser Davos, I’m not fool enough to drink saltwater._

No, the only legacy his father left him was worthless blood that made the Lord of Casterly Rock want to end him, and a religious cult want to burn him alive.

Gendry had lost his mother before he could even remember her. She’d had golden hair, he remembered, and worked in a tavern, but those memories were unreliable. Maybe he’d simply been in a tavern at two years of age, and seen a woman with blonde tresses tending tables and decided to remember her as his mother. Maybe that was a kinder memory that whatever the truth actually was.

He hadn’t hated being an apprentice exactly, but then he’d been sold to the Night’s Watch. Even though Gendry understood now, that all was likely but a plan of the King’s Hand, Lord Eddard Stark, and his Master, to save Gendry’s life (for both men knew Gendry to be Robert Baratheon’s bastard), that once supposed betrayal still ranked. Gendry’s life had been nothing but hardship, danger, and hell since. It was only of late, that he’d learned why.

And then, the Brotherhood Without Banners.

_I knew they were too good to be true._

Gendry, if he could go back in time, he’d kick himself.

…Then his Uncle’s witch, in her red silk, with her words, and her wine, and her kisses, and now, with the boat, and all the rowing.

Gendry tries not to think, for there is naught but cause for self-loathing to be gained from the thoughts in his head. He sets himself to rowing instead, and that he does for a good long while, until the dark hush of the second night closes in.

It was dark, but Gendry smells King’s Landing before he spies the lanterns on the docks. The stench is welcome to a local like him, however, a relief that he's made it at last. So Gendry sets to pull in quietly around and away from the docks where he knows no one is likely to be watching.

The little craft would not be of note or care to many, and Gendry fully intends to stay with it until morning, to sell it for whatever coin he might manage to turn for it.

Other than the boat, his knowledge and skill as a smith, Gendry comes to King’s Landing with nothing, and as no one, because if Gendry wants to live, he can call himself Gendry no longer.  

 

 

 

**ARYA**

**(Four Years Later, Having Left Braavos, Almost Done Hunting for Revenge in the Riverlands)**

   

Arya Stark is no good at being no one.

 _A girl is not just a girl_ , Arya thinks. _A girl is her blood, every man and woman who came before her, contained in her name. A girl is her family, her home, and without such, a girl is the people that she loves, or once loved._

 _…A girl is even more so the people that she hates_.

Arya Stark well knows this. The price of her revenge has been that she has thought like a betrayer, and some will say of her, that the riverlands killer is a monster.  _Wolves are wolves,_ Arya grits her teeth.  _They mark their territory; they protect their pack. They kill to eat, they kill to live. They do not kill for enjoyment._   _The lone wolf, though, separated from its pack, cornered, and  chased from its natural territory? Well, the laws of nature do not always apply to such a wolf._

All the Freys who played a part in the Red Wedding are dead now. For the wedding feast they hosted, Arya feasted last Walder Frey, and now she has crossed their names off of her list. For the Freys, there were a lot of names.

Men who knew the child Arya once was, Ned Stark’s darling dark Northern daughter, might shudder. They will say that Arya’s father and his best men are still dead. Her mother and brother are still dead. Revenge will not bring them back, but it taints Arya Stark with the same sins as those men she hunts and destroys. Revenge creates nothing but more death.

 _A girl knows that. A girl is no fool. All men must die_ , Arya Stark would reply, if any man were brave enough to say such to her face. _But other men should not choose for the Lord of Death. The God of Death needs little mortal aid in His endeavour. A girl merely punishes those who have wronged her, and have stolen time and days from her that were not their due. A girl is what she is. A girl is what others have made her._ Arya would say at last: _A girl is what she chooses._

Her sister is alive still, apparently, and has retaken their home. A battle between Ramsay Bolton and Jon Snow was fought, which people are calling now, ‘the Battle of the Bastards’, so the Direwolf flies again from Winterfell ramparts. Sansa Stark, who perhaps murdered her husband, as she likely murdered King Joffrey, is now the Lady of Winterfell, with, it seems, no plans for marrying again.

 _If Sansa does turn out to be a killer, I’ll forgive her_ Arya has already decided.

So the Boltons are dead; all the former Stark banner men-betrayers are dead. Arya didn’t get a chance to kill them herself, but before she kills Thoros and Dondarrion, maybe she can get the bastards without banners to raise Roose Bolton from the dead, so she can kill him again. But too many good folk are dead. And House Lannister still holds the Iron Throne.

Queen Cersei has gone mad, declared herself Queen, and has forsaken the religion of the Seven. She has destroyed the Sept of Baelor, and declared war on the faith.

With the Lannister Riverlands and Northern allies wiped out, and with some ill blood between Highgarden and the Martells for the Lannisters, whispers of dragons and a Targaryen Princess on even King’s Landing docks means that Arya may never get her chance for revenge against Cersei and the Kingslayer unless she moves quickly.

 _So a girl is torn._ To the South is what she has been promised. To the North is all she ever loved.

The North has declared Jon Snow King in the North. Jon Snow was Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch but apparently Wildings are crossing the walls freely these days, and some of those who took the black are no longer bound to life-long service anymore, so the North will probably starve itself out, because winter has come.

Arya sits and listens to the tavern gossip, wearing a face not her own. _A girl is able to change her face, and sometimes she can even change her mind, but she cannot change her heart. A girl is everything that has happened to her, everyone she has met, every place she has been. A girl is not able to be no one._ So while Arya sits listening she thinks about Jon.

_If he is King, then a Targaryen contender for the Iron Throne may well want the North back, and Ned Stark’s children dead._

_But...a Tagaryen would have more cause to hate King Robert’s Baratheon line, which is ended._

_Stannis and Renly are dead, and with Stannis having gone and burnt to death his only heir, there are really only the Lannisters, and Jon._

_Jon has lost a lot of men, and he’s mostly relying on the alliance with the Vale. ...If the rumours are true, and the Tagaryen Princess my father refused to have murdere_ _d back when he was the King’s Hand truly does have dragons now, and she is making for Dragonstone, then the North is already fallen._

_We rely on her mercy for Jon and Sansa to live, and for Winterfell to remain to the Stark family._

Those are dark thoughts, even for Arya, since Arya's version of mercy is a quick, clean death.

 _If, however, she only has mercenaries, an army of freed slaves,_ Arya contends, _and a Dothraki kalasar, Jon will have a better chance, but will the Vale stand with Winterfell without a formal alliance between the House of Arryn and Stark?_

No one knows, and Arya cannot not tell where her sister would, or would not marry any more. Not that Sansa Stark would be likely to do worse than she already had.

 _Jon will never force Sansa to wed against her will,_   Arya could roll her eyes, _and Sansa might not very well marry for the good of the North and for Jon, but she will go where the power is, as she has always done. She’ll marry to save her own skin, and her own comfortable existence, I’d wager_ , Arya narrows her eyes, and regrets that she can think nothing better of her sister.

If their positions had been reversed, Arya would already be dead she knew. She’d have killed Joffrey, or died a ‘traitor’ like her father, and for certain no Lannister could have wed her off. She’d have killed herself first, before she’d let anyone try to steal Winterfell from the Starks using her to do it. What work the God of Death would have made with all of that, Arya could not know. Arya only knows for certain that she would sacrifice herself to save her family, to save the North, and even just to revenge them, if all of that were already lost.

 _Still_ , Arya tries to reason it all out, because not all is yet lost as she had once believed it to be, _Aegon the Conqueoror went first for the Iron Throne, and then we Starks bent a knee, seeing the destruction come by way of dragonfire. So while Sansa is unlikely to be willing to give up the North, Jon would, if it wo_ _uld save more lives than it would cost_ , Arya reckons.

_But, Cersei Lannister would give up the Iron Throne only if she were dead, since Joffrey and Tommen are dead. Jaime Lannister killed Aerys, and Tywin Lannister killed Aery’s Queen, sisters, and offspring. Any Dragon Queen would most likely want the Kingslayer dead, and Tywin Lannister’s daughter dead, whether she wore a Baratheon-inherited crown or not._

_As I happen to want both of them dead too, that is rather convenient for a girl._

_And a girl has always wished to see dragons._

Sitting in that tavern, drinking her ale unnoticed, Arya Stark makes a decision. She decides to follow in her father’s footsteps, and make for the Iron Throne. She will kill Cersei so that the Iron Throne is free for the Dragon Queen.

 _Better the daughter of Mad King Aerys, than Mad Queen Cersei_ , Arya decides. _Besides, any woman who could set free the slaves of Mereen, couldn’t be a self-serving ruler,_ Arya reasons, _and would likely consider the wishes and desires of her people. The desires of the Northern people, any ruler sitting on the Iron Throne will soon come to know, whether they are open to the knowledge or not, is that only a Northerner can peaceably hold the seat of Winterfell. And it is a historically proven fact, that of all the Northern houses, the one with the least ambition for the Iron Throne is House Stark._

Arya holds her head aright and back straight at that. The knowledge makes her proud. The Starks have always cared about honour, family and friends, and their land and people, and about preparing for the long winter, and none of the luxuries or decadence of the rest of the Seven Kingdoms could buy them or distract them, or cause them to betray their word or their name.

Of all the gossip Arya has overheard being faceless in Westerosi taverns this season, the argument she remembers best was between two men discussing her father as Hand and his decisions:

‘Winter is coming’ are the Stark words,’ one Riverlands man mocked.

‘Have been since Brendan the Builder raised the Wall,’ a drunk man agreed, ‘but winter is upon us now.’

‘They should change it then, I reckon,’ the bitter Riverlands man went on darkly.

‘Who should?’ asked the drunk one. ‘All the Starks are dead, but the Bastard, and the Beauty, who wed Bolton and Lannister, so she’s arguably not even a Stark anymore I suppose. Or the North would have crowned her, not Lord Eddard Stark’s Watch-beholden Bastard. The Starks are dead.’

‘Exactly. The new House Words of Stark I propose are these: I did the right thing, and they killed me for it.’ The man laughed.

To which Arya had risen, looked both men straight square in the eye, and said: 'Valar morgulis'.

The two men had looked at her dumbfounded, until she laid down Lannister gold she had stolen from the Frey's and paid for their drinks with it. 'To Ned Stark,' she'd toasted and they'd grinned back her.

'To Ned Stark,' they'd shrugged and drank, wondering at the Bravossi accent coming off of the Northern-looking lad, but free drink was free drink, and times were hard.

 _All men must die,_ Arya repeats to herself, and while she does not wish yet to die, she prepares herself for when Death will come for her. She is Eddard Stark's daughter, and she will not be frightened. _A girl will live well, before a girl dies. A girl is not no one. A girl is a Stark._

 _So_ , says Arya Stark to herself, as she rises once more, _let us do right while we still draw breath._


	2. Lyanna's Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Opens with Jon's point of view. Jon and Sansa discuss why Jon has to leave Winterfell, and why Sansa should stay.
> 
> Jon, of course, makes promises that aren't in his power to keep. 
> 
> Follows with Tyrion's point of view, him advising Daenerys not to be prejudiced about allying herself with the Starks.

 

**JON**

**(Winterfell)**

 

Jon approaches Sansa in one of the private family courtyards that Sansa had recently overseen the restoration of. The glass gardens are still in shambles, but this one sweet place the Lady of Winterfell has managed the repair of.

The blue Northern roses their Aunt Lyanna had been so fond of climb the trellis formed by the arches of the loggia. Sadly, the sweet herbs are whitened silver now with frost, and the tiled courtyard is covered with a thin layer of snow.

Just so, Sansa stands huddled over a brazier kept lit under an arch of the small sloped and slated roof that had provided welcome shade during the long summer of their childhood.

Icicles had since formed on the frame of every arch along the narrow colonnade of the loggia, and while they hang like festive pennants, they are sharp, and Jon has to mind his face for them.

He ducks, taking off his leather gloves, and takes an awkward long stride to bring himself beside the Lady of Winterfell.

She is dressed in a gown of thick sage green pressed wool, and knotted grey wool wolves run in endless pattern round the hem of her skirts. Carved bone beads form their eyes. It seems the wolves’ eyes would gleam if Sansa were to move quickly away from him now.

 _It is a hunting dress_ , Jon thinks to himself, amused. But what prey did his sister hope to bring down this drear morning?

Clasped at her throat, so Jon cannot tell if there is more work to the dress, is a rough grey wolf pelt. An iron brooch on a chain secures Sansa’s furs to the side. This is a masculine gesture. She wears gloves of paler shade of sage, but they are fingerless, thus practical and utilitarian, which Sansa is not particularily famous for being.

 _Perhaps this is something for which she would like to be known?_ If so, Jon approves.

Sansa’s attention to her public appearance, and care for her wardrobe remind Jon suddenly, painfully, of Arya. _Arya always did think Sansa’s obsession with clothes was wasteful and silly._

A sharp stab of longing for his lost little sister, and pain for the deprivation of the woman he had obviously never been meant to see her become, rips across Jon’s heart.

Jon throws his hands out over the hot smoking coals there beside his one remaining sister, and thrusts his eyes into the sight of her until his dark lashes feel like they will burn.

Jon had since seen the importance of symbolism when it came to mustering men when facts and figures and rational measures will not do. Sansa was a master at saying what she wanted, without words. Sansa could speak with a dress.

Jon smiles. He is no good with words, or wordless ways, and never has been. He cannot tell if it is the smoke, or his subconscious memory, but his eyes water. “It is beautiful, Sansa,” he says, of the garden.

“It is not.” Sansa’s reply is short.

“It is,” Jon nods encouragingly over his shoulder to her work.

“It isn’t. And they’re dead,” Sansa responds in self-berating seriousness, and gestures at the stiff, stricken plants.

Jon’s breath comes in hot puffs that freeze in his lungs before he can think of anything more fitting to say, than talk of roses. He touches lightly one tight blue bud that has the tenacity to use an icicle to stake itself higher up along the carved stone of the arch. “These queer things live,” he says, as much to himself as to Sansa.

“I did not plant those,” Sansa shakes her head at him lightly. “Aunt Lyanna did.”

“Funny to think of Lyanna as a gardener, if she was, like they say, even remotely like Arya,” Jon smiles into the flames.

“I suppose,” Sansa’s lips almost quirk into a sad smile at that.

Gardening wasn’t really a fitting pastime for Arya. Stealing fruit from the orchard in the glass gardens, that was more like Arya.

“They are a stubborn enough flower to make me think of Arya,” Sansa allows. “And one need not actually have much care of them. Water them too much, they will not grow or bloom. But cut them back? Try to poison them with salt-“ for the castle flagstones were often salted to prevent ice from forming- “they’ll come back year after year.”

Sansa has forgotten for a minute, what it is she had come here to say.

“These bushes here,” she continues, “have been cut back, burned. They were razed to the flagstones when Theon took Winterfell. And now winter is come, and look at them. They’ve come back thicker than I remember them ever having been.”

“They’re a survivor,” Jon says, meeting Sansa’s gaze over the hot, smoking coals.

Neither needs to say what they actually mean.

_Arya is a survivor._

There is a long silence.

“So…” Jon begins.

“So?” Sansa glares at him over the brazier.

 _She is going to make me say it_ , Jon grates wordlessly.

“I, uh, heard you are making good progress rebuilding the glass gardens,” Jon tries to deflect. “We will at least be able to farm some vegetables, I hear. Maybe get a decent set or preserves in the stores in the next few months.”

Sansa sighs. “We are doing as well as we can with the glass that we’ve managed to scrounge from the villages, but it is not as like we can order more from the South, can we? It is not enough, and we did not come here to talk about gardens, or our stores, Jon.”

“No,” says Jon. “We didn’t.”

He sighs, heavily.

“I need dragonglass, Sansa,” he begins, but this his sister already knows. “Ser Davos says they have got dragonglass at Dragonstone, and so I have to go there and get it, whatever it takes."

From Sansa, nothing.

Jon knows Sansa supports him more than anybody, yet still he feels the need to justify his resolve to her.

“When the White Walkers come, when the Long Night is here, we have to defend ourselves.”

Sansa won’t look at him.

"If I don’t have any dragonglass, Sansa, it will be just Brienne and I, because there is no trove of Valerian steel that I know of.”

Sansa cranes her neck to face away from him and the warmth of the fire. The cold air turns her alabaster skin red, while she waits for Jon to say something that will turn this into a different story. _She fears she's heard this one before, and I suppose she has._

Jon has no other story to tell of course.

“When we left Winterfell…” Sansa tries to control the sure shake and sob that is in her voice. “When we went South… no one came back Jon.”

 _I almost didn’t come back_ , she doesn’t have to say.

Jon can read the desperation in her eyes.

_She’s afraid of losing me, but if I do not go, then we’re all already lost. The world as we know it, is lost._

The bright tears in Sansa’s sapphire blue eyes are about to freeze, so Jon reaches to wipe them away.

Sansa angrily tosses her head back from his outstretched hand, and then glares at him, blinking her tears away fiercely.

Jon's bare hand is left hanging out in the open air. Slowly, he brings his hands back to the fire. Jon doesn't know why, but this makes him angry for some unknown reason, and oh so very tired.

“I can’t baby you and tell you some fairy story Sansa. Even if we sent ravens to all the Lords in the Seven Kingdoms and ask them for their blades, which I am sure, they will all be jumping for joy to be giving those over to our noble cause, then it would still not be enough."

Nothing from her end.

"And they are coming Sansa. And when they do, none of us will come back as anything…human.

"I don’t want to go, but I must.”

Sansa is still refusing to look at him, so Jon reaches across the fire and grabs both her shoulders and shakes her lightly by the folds of her dress, which he keeps clutched tightly with his bare hands until she will look at him.

“I don’t want to leave you Sansa,” Jon says, when at long last she brings herself to meet his eyes. “I would say come with me, if I knew you would come, if I knew you would be safe if you did.

“But I don’t know what sort of welcome the ‘King in the North’ is wont to have. Not a fair one, I will reckon, at best.

“And I don’t think you could be safe outside the North. And you just got Winterfell back. And to be honest, I don’t trust anyone but you to keep Winterfell for the North. So. What else would have me do? Because I cannot think of anything else, and I am tired of thinking Sansa.”

He would laugh darkly, but he doesn't get the chance. Jon finds himself surprised, and is spun off his feet.

Sansa pulls the both of them away from the warmth of the fire, and then spins into his chest. He stumbles back a step before catching himself, and streaks of red hair seem to float in the static of the air, along with the grey fur lining her shoulders, to tickle his nose.

They hold each other tightly for a moment.

Jon feels her heartbeat, and wishes that the time could last for longer, and that they could wait in peace a while. Immediately though, he feels a stab of guilt for the thought.

_Jon Snow has already lived his life. This time is not mine. This extra time was given to me for a clear purpose._

So Jon repeats himself into the soft, sweet feathery retreat of his sister’s hair: “What would you have me do Sansa?”

Their hearts beat. He waits. After a while, Jon swears he feels snow about to fall.

“Send. Someone. Else.” Sansa manages to speak after a long while. She looks up at Jon, takes her chin and brow from the leather and fur of his shoulder, and words her soul so clearly, so that Jon feels his heart break, and his brown eyes cloud, for she asks for what she knows they cannot have. “Send someone else," she repeats.

“I can’t.”

With great difficulty he steps away from her, narrowly missing a sheet of ice hung low from over the wall. “They won’t think it is serious if I don’t go. They’ll think it is a trick or a scam.”

Sansa knows this.

“If I go to my enemies, with no army, and hand myself over, and say ‘this is me’. ‘Here is ‘the King in the North’! I have no other reason to do this, but to say that without the aid of Dragonstone we perish. I, Jon Snow, am no liar. Wights and White Walkers may be old children’s stories, but I need your dragonglass, and I’d give you my life, in case you won’t believe that.’”

Silence. Until-

"And if she asks for your life?” Sansa holds her head high, and her red rimmed eyes are cool and composed again under the layer of frost that ices her tone.

“She won’t.” Jon sighs. “Daenarys Tagaryen will ask for my crown. She’ll ask for the North.”

“It’s not yours to give,” Sansa notes.

“She is not likely to understand that,” Jon emphasizes, and rubs the back of his neck. “But I would not be lying then, when I tell her, I do not want it, will I?”

“So you will go South,” Sansa says without any feeling at all.

“So I will,” Jon agrees. “So shall we go inside, and explain that to the North?” So saying, Jon rubs his hands together to warm them, ducks back under the arch, and motions for Sansa to follow him back into the castle. It is very cold out to be standing away from the fire and outside any longer without a good reason. The need for privacy is done.

“Very well,’ Sansa says, but she makes no move, and stands instead out under the open courtyard, as if she were a child who had never seen a winter, and were waiting for snow to fall so that she could play in it.

Jon rubs his cheek on his shoulder, snuffs his nose, and takes that perfect blue rose bud from the vine. Braving the open air and reaching Sansa, he puts it in her hair.

“I will go South,” he assures his grown little sister. “But I’ll come back. Like Aunt Lyanna’s roses, Sansa. I swear to you. I’m like a weed. They cut me down, and I just come back as more.”

 _And what if dragons burn you?_ Sansa’s eyes seem to challenge him.

Jon doesn’t know the answer to that so he just murmurs, as they leave the courtyard together, Sansa leading the way, the eyes of the wolves in her skirts flashing at him as she moves away inside:

“Like Lyanna’s roses.”

 

 

 

**TYRION**

**(Dragonstone)**

It had been easy enough for the Mother of Dragons to take back Dragonstone.

No man had ever truly loved Stannis.

 _Well_ , thinks Tyrion Lannister to himself, _except for those religious fanatics._

One adherent of the faith of R’hollar had recently lit himself on fire in Daenery’s throne room.

The Queen had insisted on getting to know the people of Westeros, and had admitted the local peasants to present their grievances to their new Queen, in order for her to make amends and justice where she could. It was a laudable, albeit premature gesture.

Daenerys, admirably, would not be deterred from attempting to continue with her audience days for the common folk whilst she inhabited Dragonstone, by the charred corpse of one flaming fanatic.

“If he had wished to end his life by fire, I could have arranged for him to be fed to one of my children,” Daenerys had said calmly, while Varys apologized for the lapse in security, and bustled to have the mess cleaned up.

Tyrion, however, knew her well enough to know her composure had been shaken by the display.

 _He wanted us to know his God is worth dying for_.

This thought troubled Tyrion greatly as more tales came forward from the peasants, and tradesfolk of Dragonstone, of Stannis burning alive any who did not renounce the Seven, and profess the faith of the Fire God his Red Priestess had brought him from over the sea.

Those who served Stannis during the War of the Five Kings served him from out of the old-fashioned notion that he was rightfully in line after Robert Baratheon. Anyone who would not accept Joffrey, Tommen, or Myrcella as his true heirs, but wished to remain loyal to the iron throne, had done so, if East, West, and South, greed and ambition, or North, pride, had not deterred them from doing so.

If he were not Lannister-through-and-through, Tyrion Lannister might have at least admitted that Stannis had the claim, if not the makings, of one who might sit the Iron Throne.

Daenerys had the claim through her Tagaryen-Conqueror blood, and she generally had the ability to see in shades of grey, as Stannis Baratheon had been unwilling to.

 _A King or Queen who would see the world divided and into those who are good, and those who are evil will go mad, for all men have a little of both in them_ , Tyrion knows. _Good rulers know their men, and know how to use them to do what must be done. Great rulers know how to make men want to endeavor towards what could yet be done._

“I need no further proof that these Baratheon usurpers deserve to be thrown down, and Westeros liberated,” Daenerys’ eyes are hard, when at last she learns of Stannis’ fate at the hands of the Bolton forces. “They are child-killers. Those who try to claim my throne through such profanity and wickedness, or those who support those who do, support the murder of infants? The burning to death of little girls?”

The fate of Princess Shireen had been surprising even to Tyrion, but then, religion was a funny thing.

“Robert Baratheon supported the death of any Tagaryen out of hatred and by way of reason of old grievances, your Majesty. That the man was too little a man to have even grown past such,” Tyrion murmurs, casually nursing from his wine cup.

Daenerys raises her eyebrows at the insinuation.

 _Yes,_ Tyrion does not need to say. _I am implying that you need to get over your grudges against the Starks if you want to retake the Seven Kingdoms._

Queen Daenerys looks to be in no mood for lecture, but encouraged by his elected Queen’s silence, Tyrion continues, admittedly, a little drunk. “He should never have been King, if we are to speak now but of right and wrong, and good of evil.

“But,” Tyrion raises his hands in a gesture of peace between them, “as I am not nearly drunk enough, your Majesty, to speak of the world in a tense that clearly does not exist, I will say this. My brother, did not take the throne. And Eddard Stark got there first, and he did not want it. Robert got it, because he won a game of musical chairs.”

Tyrion laughs to himself. “Musical thrones. How quaint.

“But in all seriousness, the man did nothing to deserve it afterwards either, except, not burn folk to death.”

“He sent assassins after me,” Daenarys hisses. “I broke no laws.”

 _When she was but a child that wanted home with a lemon tree, and not kingdom and throne_ , Tyrion would sigh, but he had said they would not speak of the world in tenses that do not exist.

“One might argue that your continued existence was an act of treason.” Tyrion shrugs. “And you stand here today with a fleet and an army, and three dragons, more or less because he did. Eddard Stark broke his unflinching support from his foster-brother because of that. The North ceded from the Seven Kingdoms, my family took the Iron Throne, took the Riverlands, and even the North a while, through betrayal and murder, and lost it because my sister is insanely sure of herself, and does not know how to bury a grudge. Trust me, we can rely on her stupid rage to lose even the superior forces she commands. So Westeros is ripe for the taking, as it stands, weak, and divided.

“But trust me when I tell you this now, my most esteemed Majesty, that grudges between houses and child-killing have lost men the seven kingdoms. But religion may make monsters out of saviours. It is a flip of a coin. So while one could allow that the Baratheon line has ended, as it began, ironically,” Tyrion finishes what remains in his cup, “with child murder. It is the deaths of your father and siblings, and the attempts of assassins, that bring you here, on this day, as the Mother of Dragons, and Rightful Heir to the Iron Throne, and Westeros.”

Queen Daenerys has little patience, for Varys’ little birds announced this morning that the King in the North will be coming to her court at Dragonstone to ask for an alliance. He had announced his plans, to the spare delight of his own counsel, and had commissioned a ship from some house called Manderlay. Jon Snow likely had not left White Harbor yet, but he would soon, and Daenerys did not know how to prepare herself for his coming.  

Being that he is a Stark, even if he is but a Stark bastard, and despite the fact that Tyrion Lannister actually seems to admire the leader of the rebelling North, Daenerys is still one brother short due to the young man’s father.

“Speak plainly Lannister. If you would suggest I forgive the wrongs done to my family by the Starks, say it,” Daenerys demands. “But I shall also speak plainly. The Starks did not forgive the Boltons. Someone is killing the Freys, so I would assume that the Starks have not forgiven the Freys, The Starks did not forgive my family. And I did not come here to claim six kingdoms, I came for seven.”

“I am saying no such thing, your Majesty, though you have spoken well enough for the both of us. All I was saying, was, that were I a religious man, the actions of others that have brought you here might send shivers down my spine.”

Missendei has entered the room bearing more refreshments. The Queen’s eyes do not leave Tyrion’s face.

“Short and wretched as my spine is, I am not a religious man, for I believe no God could be as cruel as the God that made me,” Tyrion nods, “and so. I only care about your actions here and now. And I would advise you not to underestimate Jon Snow. I only knew him as a boy, not yet a man, but from I can tell you, he might be a bastard, but he’s proud. He might be a Stark, but he’s alive still. So that also says something. So he’s obviously a proud man who can learn from his, and others’ mistakes, and that _is_ a rare quality.”

“And you think I lack this quality?” the Queen holds herself very still.

“I think you are still learning it,” Tyrion tries to be diplomatic but honest, “but you have not always had it. Mistakes you made in Meereen will cost you your life here in Westeros.

“And with this new alliance Euron Greyjoy has made with Cersei,” ---Yara and Theon Greyjoy had brought that dark cloud to them--- “you do not have the men to take the South, without winning over some other Westerosi houses. We can both admit that the ones who have come running to you have no men to loose, or want too much in return for too little.”

Daenerys says nothing, lost in thought. Tyrion does not wish for his Queen to be lost at all, and so he sets to guide her straight: “Of all the options you have, your Majesty, however unlikely they are, you are more likely to get a bent knee from Eddard Stark’s son, than you are from my sister. For Cersei, you will need her head. I am trying to get it for you but I think you will need a Stark alliance for that aim.”

Daenerys sits back. “Very well. I shall meet this pretender ‘King in the North’ so they call him. I will promise him aid in liberating his,” she shakes her hand dismissively, trying to remember, “-sister’s Uncle.

“What else will he want?”

Varys had told her about the captive Edmure Tully. If the rightful heir to Riverrun could be restored, and owe that to a Targaryen crown, then the Riverlands had plenty more men to bolster Daenery’s army. If they also had the men of the North, as depleted as those be, if Jon Snow could be counted on to keep the men of the Vale, then their combined forces would be stronger than the Lannister armies.

The Queen’s Hand was amused. “What has the North ever wanted? Their freedom. To be “Northern’. Things you are not offering them by asking Jon Snow to renounce his Kingship for certain. But when Aegon came, more than being free, more than being their own Kingdom, the North did not want to see Winterfell fall, as Harrenhal fell. The Jon Snow I met had a direwolf, but he did not have dragons.”

“I thought you did not want me to threaten to burn his beloved north to the ground.”

Tyrion stared at his Queen long and hard in the space of a small stretch of silence, keeping his eyes level and hard. “I would suggest you offer to marry him, for his armies-”

Daenerys barely manages to control the sputter that the suggestion causes.

“-for you have married worse men and gained worse results. But since you have an aversion to Starks on principal,” Tyrion sighs. “My own experience was not exceptional, this is true, but you do not have the great fortune that is my beauty, my Queen...”

“-He is a bastard.” Daenerys sputters, offended. “And an oath-breaker.”

“Both sins for which he most likely has the best of excuses for, I deem,” Tyrion allows. “I assure you he is handsome, healthy man despite, ere I last met the lad. And there is the precedent in your family for appreciating dark, Northern beauty.”

Daenerys almost does not let the reference to her brother Rhaegar’s alleged kidnapping and rape of Lyanna Stark go, but Tyrion is already well and truly past it:

“And he is of age to you. And he seems to have done quite well for himself since. Despite still being a bastard, of course.

“But then, I suppose, we could always wait for another Targaryen relative of yours to rise from the grave. That would be more fitting of course,” Tyrion presses, and Daenerys sets her jaw at that, but that just means Tyrion knows he has won her.


	3. Carvings of Compunction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter is Jaime realizing he's been too late for a lot in life, including realizing that even though Cersei is his twin, he never really knew her. He's regretting some of the choices he's made in life, but is too far down the road he's chosen to turn back.
> 
> Then it is...Harry, in Kingslanding. He's not a new character. He's a blacksmith, who apparently used to work in Harrenhal... if that helps;). 
> 
> Harry visits a tavern for news, then goes home to his adopted family: a pretty girl who gets herself into too much trouble, and three adopted boys from the streets he's taken in. Life seems safe and sweet, and although there is still something missing from his life, Harry is content with his lot in life... until it seems that someone has figured out that Harry isn't Harry from Harrenhal at all.

**JAIME**

**(The Red Keep, King’s Landing)**

News from the North was getting increasingly harder to come by, as the North rallied around House Stark, and winter came at last.

The news of the Bolton defeat by Jon Snow and Sansa Stark with a Wilding army, and perhaps even more incredibly, the armed might of the Vale, came late to the Red Keep.

Jaime’s return was also late. Too late to save King Tommen, too late to prevent the death of his Uncle Kevan, and that of his fanatic nephew.

 _I already knew in my heart it was too late to save Cersei_ , Jaime fidgets with his golden hand, as he once would have absent-mindedly reached for the pommel of the sword that would have been hung at his waist with said hand…that was no longer there.

When Jaime had heard of the burning of the Sept of Baelor his worst fear had been that Cersei had been killed in the explosion.

He had almost forgiven her then, when he thought she was lost to him forever, for Osmund Kettleback, and the other worms she had been screwing or promising to screw for the Seven knew what in hell.

He would not have thought her capable of blowing up the Sept of Baelor with their blood relatives in it, for he might have been an oath-breaker, but Jaime Lannister was no kin-slayer.

But, that was what had been, and Jaime had been too late to stop any of it.

So, their Uncle Kevan was dead, and so were all Lannister claims to being politically experienced or culpable for the running of a Kingdom at war with itself.

As far as Jaime himself could tell, and Jaime was no military strategist, with their father dead, Tyrion fled, and their Uncle singed unto the stone debris of the smoking hole of the Sept, there was no objective or educated hand guiding the moves of Lannister forces, or even the city Gold Cloaks.

The only advisers Cersei seemed to trust was a deranged Maestor who liked to perform medical experiments on prisoners and corpses, who had an aptitude for fire and torture, and Jaime himself.

Of late Jaime could not see Cersei listening to anyone who did not readily agree with her, tell her she was the brightest, the most deserving, and the only rightful heir to the Iron Throne.

Telling her she was the only one for him, still the most beautiful woman in the world to him, did not even work anymore to bring her back to him. All the space Cersei had left in her heart was for their dead children, and hatred for those she believed responsible for their deaths.

Herself excluded, of course.

“I will wipe every last one of the Tyrell’s from the face of this earth!” Cersei swears almost daily now. Tonight she rampages through the bedroom they finally share, the bell sleeves of her fine red and gold brocade dressing gown swinging as she rages. “I will cut those roses back! I will crown the Queen of Thorns with thorns. I will see how she likes an iron cage with spikes!”

Jaime is weary, and would sleep.

“Maybe you should ask Qyburn to fit you one for Olenna Tyrell,” Jaime suggests, _because she probably already has asked her insane Maestor to design such a contraption._

 _Knowing Qyburn, he’s already used it_ , Jaime reflects numbly, before Cersei’s flaying, and pacing about, distract him.

 _Cersei is beautiful, and there is just something so very sensual about the back of her neck_ , Jaime stares pointedly at the spot at the back there, where her recently shorn crop of hair stops short. _Also, less to get in the way, if she_ …

But Cersei has not taken him in her mouth of late, and any time they have lain together, it had been a pitying kind of love making, or an act of attempted coercion on Cersei’s part.

But it seems Cersei will not let him sleep, although the subject of Olenna Tyrell posting Highgarden forces between the pass into Dorne is old news.

_No man who would rather be having sex would enjoy being interrupted with reminders about Olenna Tyrell._

Jaime has no head for politics. He has never desired to be a Lord in a castle, or a King with a Kingdom to keep. He wouldn’t have had the patience for it.

Standing guard would seem to require patience, but the patience it required, the dedication, was of a different nature, the kind that suited Jaime.

 _All I ever wanted was this woman_ , Jaime watches Cersei, with her letters and her wine, and the madness glittering in her lovely, red rimmed, spitefully sleepless eyes. _To be with her open and free_ , or, he allows, _to die protecting the King, if Aerys didn’t deserve to die. But he did. So now I have all I ever dreamed, and all I want to do is bloody go to sleep._

Yes, Jaime had been too late to serve a good, true King, though he would have served Rhaegar if Rhaegar had won, and not Robert.

 _What an odd thought, that,_ Jaime wonders, while Cersei rails. _I’m not usually the philosophical type. That’s more Tyrion’s style._

Jaime still hated Robert Baratheon. Hated him for being able to have Cersei, and not appreciating her, and betraying her for every other loose pair of legs that came along, for always letting her know she was not Lyanna Stark, and could never take the wretched dead Stark girl’s place.

 _Robert made her like this_ , Jaime contends, not willing to blame Cersei, nor willing to blame the Starks, Tyrion, and the Tyrells quite yet.

 _If Cersei had not arranged his hunting accident, I would have killed him. I should have killed him,_ Jaime is so tired wishes he could sleep. _Maybe then I wouldn’t dream of little Stark boys falling into an abyss forever._

The latest news, of Eddard Stark’s Night’s Watch bastard being declared ‘King in the North’, and of a Targaryen claimant with dragons landing at Dragonstone, was not being received well by Cersei of course, on account of its lateness. She could not sleep, imagining what this person said or thought or did despite there being a lack of real news beyond those bare threads, and so she wove a tapestry of complex schemes to contend with the unknown, and the threat of betrayal she imagined on all fronts.

While the news came slow, stories, on the other hand, spread like Mad King Aerys’ wildfire.

The stories said that Jon Snow had been killed and brought back to life, and so the Night’s Watch considered his vows to be fulfilled, and Eddard Stark’s son was free to try for Winterfell with his sister. The stories said he took Winterfell with the aid of wolves, and giants, and that Wildllings follow him because he promises to defend Westeros from White Walkers, that childhood story that Jaime and Cersei’s mother had told them when they were still small.  

 _Whitewalkers, and giant ice spiders_ , Jaime had to laugh. They had to be stories, for they were too outlandish and fantastical to give rational credence to.

“What is so funny?” Cersei demands. “Does news of the Tyrell betrayal amuse you?”

“Eddard Stark’s bastard amuses me,” Jaime sits back on the goose feather pillows on their bed.

Cersei’s eyes glitter dangerously.

Jaime pays her no mind. “Do you know I once mocked him, for joining the Night’s Watch?”

Cersei sets her jaw to warn him that his story better have a point that at least aligns with the subject of her previous rant.

“I did,” Jaime rubs the light golden stubble on his chin. “Yet he has managed to use the Night’s Watch to get himself a Wilding Army, and to create a whole myth around himself about being some invincible savior for mankind, and he’s got the North, and no one had to legitimize him for them to do it.”

“Through treason,” Cersei all but growls.

“Aye," Jaime guffaws darkly. "And I join the Kingsguard, stop a mad man, and they call me Kingslayer. I should have joined the Night's Watch it seems. Alas, I look better in white...

"If he takes the North and somehow manages to ally himself with this Tagaryen girl-“

“-Tagaryen pretender!” Cersei cuts, and if her words were claws, they would have slashed out his throat, Jaime knows.

“-Then they will march on us. So I do not think revenge on Olenna Tyrell, will very much matter to us then.”

“What makes you think that traitorous bastard will dare take his men South? Those Northern Lords are afraid of losing any of the few sons they have left, and they know what we do to their daughters.”

“Because that is the only option left to him, other than wait for you or the dragons to come to him. Starks have a habit of bending to dragons.”

Cersei smiles prettily then at him, and crawls into bed beside him. “So you have been listening. You are not totally useless after all.” She kisses the bridge of her brother’s nose.

Jaime stills, unnerved by the sudden change in her demeanor.

Slipping off her robe, and sliding naked through the sheets to cover his half-clothed body with her warm, exposed skin, Cersei relaxes in his arms. They do not make love. They just lie there quietly and Jaime allows himself to pretend that they could grow old like this, without war, and revenge, and the end of one regime or another about to topple down over them.

Cersei closes her eyes. But before she drifts completely off to sleep she says: “Have no worries of that. I have made a plan…No one will be leaving Dragonstone.”

Jaime opens one eye, and cups Cersei’s right breast. “If you mean to send the Ironborn, in wooden ships, against dragons, even I came up with, and decided against that.” He gives the nipple a light squeeze.

Cersei swats his hand away almost playfully. “That is what everyone will think, that I am a mad fool, just a woman. That is what I want them to think. But I know how men think. Let men think they know me. They never will.”

Jaime lies stiff and cold at that, and she sleeps, finally breathing peacefully. He sits up on one elbow as best he is able, and peers at her.

When sleeping, she looks younger, like the girl he grew up with, fell in love with, and still remembers. All the ugliness and pain is wiped away. And while he sits just so, Jaime Lannister can almost pretend that the girl, the woman he once knew, was never just a figment of his own imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

**HARRY**

**(The Sword and Staves Tavern, Fleabottom, King’s Landing)**  

 

“Let me tell you a joke,” the Dornish merchant announces to the room, after having patiently endured several rounds of _The Dornish Man’s Wife_ , sung primarily for his benefit.

 _This isn’t going to go well_ , thinks Harry Smith, who is trying to finish his stew.

There are half a dozen taverns in Fleabottom that are safer than _the Sword and Staves,_ but only one or two of them have as fine a beef stew for as little coin as that which is served at _the Sword and Staves_. The gravy of _the Sword and Staves_ stew is rich and creamy, and thick with carrots and potatoes. Not quite a stew worth getting stabbed over, aye, but for the coin, it bought a man a place at a table with the present company, who are mostly well armed men, with coin in their purses to burn.

Harry, while he does not like the danger of armed men, they are his best customers, and so it is from _the Sword and Staves_ that he often picks up a customer or two. This, while delighting in a small clay crock pot of Fleabottom’s finest, and a tankard of ale filled high to the brim. The barman of _the Sword and Staves_ is not stingy, not with so many daggers and blades in frog belts frequenting his establishment.

“Aye, so I have finally figured out how you all name places, outside of my beautiful, warm, sunny Dorne,” the Dornish man continues, flashing an irreverent smile. Harry finds himself falling under the spell of the man’s unapologetically perfect and brilliant white teeth. The Queen’s men and Gold Cloaks in the room, along with the pirates, and other bold townsfolk like Harry himself, quiet themselves. They are waiting to be amused, and ready to take insult out of boredom if nothing less.  

“You all are a literal lot aren’t you?” The Dornish man drinks the finest wine _the Sword and Staves_ has with a wry flourish from a glass he has brought into the tavern himself. “No poetry.

“Do you know why you call King’s Landing King’s Landing?”

The candles in the wrought iron chandeliers suspended from the low, exposed and extensively, albeit rustically, painted beams, flicker softly at his words, as if every man in the room offers an indrawn breath. There is utter silence in the room.

“Well, King Tommen jumped from a window, so King’s Landing.”

The Gold Cloaks rise and move to stand behind the merchant, who remains calmly seated. The rest of folk in _the Sword and Staves_ wait with bated breath. The barman wipes a heavy tin tankard down with a clean square of torn cotton cloth, frayed at the edges, and infinitely more detailed to Harry’s eye, due the stillness in the room.

The Dornish man simply shrugs. “Not all jokes translate well across cultures.”

At this, one of the Gold Cloaks gives a loud guffaw, and slaps the merchant across the back, causing the man’s glass to wobble precariously on the counter where it sits now, steadied by the merchant’s gold ring bedecked hand. Then the two shake each other’s hands and grin, to the evident relief of the room. All therein composed find the air to breathe again.

Harry’s interest is piqued by the merchant, and he decides perhaps, when it is apt to draw less notice, to approach the man later for news from the East, and about the roads in the Seven Kingdoms.

“Didn’t one of the traitor, Eddard Stark’s sons fall from a tower at Winterfell?” another of the Gold Cloaks smirks stupidly, well pleased with himself for adding the notion. “Winter fall, Winterfell.”

Harry’s ears prick up at mention of Winterfell, for if the rumors were to be believed, Winterfell had a new Lord and Lady, and the North had a new King.

 _Arya’s brother and her sister,_ Harry thinks, not that he has much right to think about Arya Stark anymore.

_Arya Stark is dead, or else she would be in Winterfell with her family._

News of the Red Wedding broke Harry’s hardened heart. Not that Harry had much of a heart for breaking. Life had taught him to smile at the broken, jagged pieces of himself spread out, and pretend they made him more than other people who never knew disappointment or wanting in life.

The last anyone knew of Arya, the last Harry himself knew, was that she was heading for the Twins to be ransomed by the Brotherhood Without Banners. If she’d gotten there, if they’d sold her, she’d have been slaughtered like the rest of the North men. If she hadn't, well she seemed to be just as likely dead in a ditch somewhere. 

No one had spoken of the lost Stark girl since back before Eddard Stark’s execution, and Harry just assumed Beric Dondarrion would not be proud of boasting of the Brotherhood’s sending her bound for slaughter.

Harry-Gendry-had initially thought of escaping to try to head North to join with Robb Stark’s men, and see if he could find Arya again, and ask her to get her brother to let him make swords, but then he’d heard about the Red Wedding. Also, although Harry did not like to admit it, he would probably never make another trek North.

The roads were too dangerous, filled with murderous deserters and cutthroats. Even the woods and out of the way ways were the employ of random roving bands of brigands.

He’d ask this Dornish man, but he was sure, that without a party of armed men, a single solitary traveler would not be safe even if they were allowed passage from the city gates. 

_And I’ve no woods craft. It was only Arya that got Hot Pie and I as far on those back trails as we did._

He smiles into his ale at that, like an old man. He still remembers their argument about the moss.

 _But I never doubted her when she said she’d killed a man with that Bravos blade of her’s,_ Harry rubs the side of his face with one hand, remembering, and his blue eyes wrinkle at the corners with a pride placed in Arya Stark, as much as a small measure of that pride is placed in himself, for knowing she was something more than anybody else saw, before anyone else saw that about her. _I always kind of thought that might have been an accident though,_ he allows.

He had heard her muttering her list of men and women she owed revenge to on into the night, when they’d huddled together for warmth. He only pretended that he hadn’t heard, but it had been hard to sleep with her shivering.

_She was such a skinny little thing._

He’d listened to the names, and committed them to memory, as he had her face, and her eyes, the undertones to her skin, and half the highlights in her hair. Knowing he could die in the morning, or that she could be killed and there was nothing he would be able to do about it, made every sight and sound those long dread nights more vivid.

In his nightmares his friend was still bound to a chair in his place, with a bucketful of rats placed to her bare stomach, and not being able to do anything. Harry could swear he woke up with bruises on his wrists for the struggles he made but in dreams.

Nights these days the dreams still came, but changed. This time when the Tickler went to lift Arya’s tunic with his bucket full of rats, he would see her breasts, not that Arya Stark had had breasts back when the nightmares began.

Harry did not like to think about what that could mean, but it meant the nightmares had become worse somehow.

Sometimes he would like to go to Hot Pie, not that he could make it that far, not that he could find work in a Tavern. Harry’s hands were too big for kneading dough, the muscles in his arms too defined to let any wandering army looking for conscripts, or armed thugs looking for trouble, to leave him alone.

No, Harry Smith, son of the smith from Harrenhal, Harry maintained, somewhat ludicrously, eked out more than a comfortable enough living in Fleabottom, picking up odd custom orders here and there from men at places like _the Sword and Staves_ , and doing some regular work in the forges of other smiths who were more than willing to take credit for Harry’s superior work and skill.

“Someone has to stone to death that Tagaryen whore at Dragonstone,” one of the Gold Cloaks toasts the Dornish merchant. “That will be poetry to Queen Cersei’s ears.”

The Dornish man rocks his head to the side, and catches Harry’s eye. Harry is quick to look away, but he notes, out of the corner of his eye, the Dornish man smiles to himself, as if he knows a secret about Harry that these fools around him are too stupid to guess.

 _Dornish men have always been kinder to bastards,_ Harry rushes to leave the establishment, but not willing to make the urgency of his going obvious to anyone observant enough to have care for one dark haired young man’s doing so.

Having finished his stew, and feeling hot all of of sudden, Harry rises, and leaves what is left of his ale, to stumble outside into the warm, stinking air of the city at night.

Looking left and right, to make sure he is not being followed, Harry takes a way he normally doesn’t go, that is a little longer, a little more around and about, until he reaches the side door of the townhouse in which he rents a room from an old widowed merchant’s wife.

A simple, but large iron padlock bars the black painted wooden door, and Harry is one of five persons who have a key, including the widow.

He opens the door to his room, which is really two rooms, one of which is divided with a simple curtain hung across it, and the other having three little sleeping boys lying on scrounged thread-bare carpets and palm mats on the floor.

 _Good, the boys have eaten_ , Harry thinks. _Willow fed them._ Looking about the place, Harry realizes that Willow has also cleaned up after him.

A washed and folded tunic, and a patched leather jerkin are set to the bottom base of his regular pile of blankets, which smell something of soap, and a little of lavender, so he supposes the trail of soot he’d left had been an unwelcome addition to their little home for Willow. After a full day’s toil at the forge, he’d been too tired to wash or change and had just stumbled to bed, asleep as he’d pretty much stood.

Willow was the pretty but older woman, that Harry had more or less of taken in. She was tall and golden blonde, with defined cheekbones, a small waist, and with hips and, well, enough of everything else to make many a head turn. Her age was not like to show but through sorrow, for her eyes had a cat-like slant to them that hid age well, and her laughter was charming and warm. She had a clever wit, a gentle manner, and, although it would embarrass Harry to use such flowery language, the only way he could describe how she moved was to add that she had a graceful carriage to her, and all of this combined is what got her into trouble with men.

When Harry had met Willow he had been on his way to the forge and a creep had been of the mind to manhandle her. For although the man bothering Willow had clearly paid for the basket of clothes Willow had been mending and washing that she held tightly across her chest as a shield, he had not paid for Willow’s clothes, nor did the girl look like she was willing to trade in such, and the wretch was tearing at them, and pushing her into a back alley.

Harry had cursed himself, but he hated bullies. He had followed the pair into the alley.

‘I think you should pay for your clothes and go,’ Harry had warned the man.

At the addition of another male figure, Willow hadn’t known whether to praise the Seven, or if she had fallen into some further misery.

‘I think you should mind your own business.’ The man had dumped the basket of his own clothes into the mud of the alley. ‘I paid for this girl here,’ he pawed a trembling Willow, ‘to wash ‘em, and as clear as you can see, lad, she’s ruined ‘em.’

‘So you will take her clothes a while to have her back good for them eh?’ Harry had inquired boldly. ‘A dirty deed for a dirty deed?’

‘Huh?’ the man seemed confused by his language, and Harry cursed himself, for trying to sound like a bloody highborn from some story, rescuing blushing maidens from vile villains. This was Fleabottom, and the maidens didn’t regularly blush. They were more likely to steal your purse or knife you.

But Willow was obviously some country girl come new to the city, or else she was a right idiot, delivering anything alone to this corner of the city.

In the end Harry had left the man bleeding in the mud with his clothes. Not before he had made sure to rip the man’s shirt, to stuff it in his nose, to stop the flow of blood. The nose was broken, but not so much into his brain as to leave him dead, but the blood was a lot.

Willow had just stood there staring at Harry like an idiot.

‘Come on now,’ Harry had all but stopped himself from grabbing her wrist. A woman who had just nearly been raped wouldn’t want another man to touch her. ‘I am not going to hurt you. But that man will probably set the Gold Cloaks on us if we don’t get out of here, so if you want me to get you back to where you’ll be safe-‘

‘I’m not going to fall in love with you just because you act kind,’ Willow warned him, setting her basket on her hip. She did look right like she was the type apt to have men falling in love with her all over the place, Harry supposed, but it did her a discredit in his mind, to make it plainly known that she was aware of the fact.

‘Good to know,’ Harry had all but rolled his eyes, ‘for I’ve no use for women who act like simpering little highborn ladies’ maids when they are clearly senseless, down-on-their-luck washerwomen.’

Willow had glared at him with all of a Highborn ladies’ venom, but then she had cast her eyes down. ‘It is that obvious?’ she inquired meekly.

‘It is,’ Harry had allowed, but kindly, and so she had permitted him to escort her safely back to where she’d been staying. He learnt her name, and his mistake was to tell her his.

Of course, with a girl like Willow, it was not long until the landlady’s husband had made an unwelcome advance on her, that the landlady had, of course, not understood, and Willow found herself homeless, and had asked for Harry at the forges.

She had seen his hammer that day when he had rescued her. Turns out, Willow was not an entirely dim girl.

...And that is how Willow had come to stay with Harry.

Harry sighed. The girl had a twin brother, apparently, but he was next to useless, and a womanizing, drunken rover. Their mother was dead apparently, their father having turned their mother out, and started her on her profession of whoring.

Willow was a country girl to be sure, but she’d confided to Harry’s shock, that her mother had been a prostitute who had turned beggar in Lannisport, and all the money she’d ever earned, which was quite a bit of silver and gold it seemed, was to pay for a soldier’s commission for Willow’s brother, and a dowry for Willow.

But then, of course, Willow had met other children who had parents like her own or worse, and that’s what had happened to Willow’s dowry, and why Harry had three boys to feed and clothe and house. It was not easy to say no to Willow.

Harry and the boys called her “The Queen of Fleabottom” for a reason.

It did not trouble Harry that their neighbors thought ‘Her Highness’ was his wife, and the boys, ‘her little princes’, his stepsons. He’d always wanted a family, and although he probably could afford to marry now, Harry did not think about marrying.

War was coming. The number of swords, spears, and arrow tips he was making was proof of that. No one was ordering hinges and cauldrons. Willow and the boys would be trouble enough if a siege came to King’s Landing, let alone dragons. It was hard enough to lose one's fake and adopted family. To lose a real family, Harry didn't want to know what that felt like.

Because of that, Harry thinks once again, foolishly, of trying to make a life in the country, but he has to admit it, although he has been hungry and slept under open air, a cottage is no life for him.

He is city-born and bred. He likes this town house, with its high-beamed ceiling, and even door frames. He likes to go to work, and eat out after and have a few drinks and come home, and make sure Willow has dresses to hem and shirts to mend and wash enough. He can play with the boys, take them to work with him, apprentice them, and give them some hope of a better life.

No, Harry is not cut out to be some highborn hero from a story. But he can be the hero of this little part of Fleabottom. So Harry decides, before he sleeps, grateful to Willow for the clean bedding, and the sleeping boys.

The decision does not seem to be his alone to make however.

Willow wakes him when she comes in the morning. She makes money sewing late at night by candle for a tailor, and although Harry has warned her she'll likely go blind, she doesn't like to accept any more of his charity than she has to. They keep the house and watch the boys in shifts. Willow and Harry rarely sleep at the same time. Life is less intimate that way. Willow can keep her modest pride, and Harry can keep his sense and very male need for privacy. 

She has brought him two hot biscuits from the baker, whose linens she'd washed, and she draws the curtain across her side of the room while he pops them into his mouth.

"They're hot!" he grumbles. _Hot but good._ "Thanks Will. I'm off."

Then Harry grabs his most expensive tools, those he always carries with him, and opens the front door. Almost mindlessly, Harry goes to lock the iron padlock on the townhouse’s black door, but instantly his hand freezes, as if he can sense that something is about to go very wrong with the day.

He looks behind him, and then he looks up. Most tall men wouldn't, but Harry does.

Over the plain wooden black beam of the lintel he finds a Baratheon stag carved into the door’s black paint.


	4. Riverlands Reunions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First up is Arya: 
> 
> Arya is heading south, still holding to her plan to assassinate Cersei, although the first fall of snow makes her a little home-sick. 
> 
> She meets the Brotherhood Without Banners again.
> 
> The Brotherhood (mostly Anguy) do their best to convince Arya to join them and go back North to Winterfell. Arya decides to go with them, because Anguy informs her that the Red Woman is camped with them. Arya has the Red Woman, Thoros of Myr, and Lord Beric on her list, so she goes. The Brotherhood have a Raven from Jon though, so Arya agrees to see it before she decides on going North or South, or killing anybody.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys. Meant to do Chapter four over two days turned into a week. Oh well. Also, because of that Chapter Four got a little long, so I had to just end it. Thanks for over 100 kudos though, and for subscribing and the bookmarks. Chapter Five will continue with Arya, then go to short Bran, because we have to get back to Winterfell, and then Chapter Six will probably be Jon meeting Daenerys. And then the action will finally begin as Cersei and Littlefinger plot, and the Night King makes his next move. I hope you all like a good large dose of Arya in the meantime, because she's my fave.

**ARYA**

**(Heading South through the Riverlands)**

 

There is a full moon, and the falling snow catches in her lashes.

Arya is a Stark from Winterfell. She is from the North. Snow should not excite childish feelings of warmth and comfort for her.

_I know it is winter now. Even this far South the snow is falling._

But Arya can’t help herself.

Yes, she knows that snow means travel becomes difficult, even at times impossible. Yes, it means that people can freeze to death if not properly outfitted, and old, young, and weak get sick more often. She knows that it means that food and game are less, and that no crops may be sown.

But Arya was born during a long summer…and she was in Braavos for a long time.

Snow reminds her of home.

Some of the best memories she has of her family are of them on days when it snowed, waking up early on mornings when snow had just fallen, or staying up late into the night, waiting for the first flake to fall.

Snow reminds her Bran’s snow forts, and of besting Bran and Rickon in a snow ball fight, or of how red Sansa would turn when Arya deigned to ruin her older sister’s snow castles.

Snow reminds her of standing with her father on the ramparts of Winterfell, telling him she could smell the snow before it stormed. Her father’s laugh, when he disbelieved this skill of her’s, Arya can still hear.

She remembers her first taste of her mother’s mulled wine, the spice of it, when they came in from playing. Cinnamon, cloves, dried lemon, star anise, and dried summer berries, still on her tongue, scent still clear in her nose. Even though now, she is just imagining it, because the cool, clear air that denotes snowfall, evokes such.

Arya shakes her head at the memory of Robb complaining of Theon cheating, by making ice balls, instead of snowballs. Theon Greyjoy’s ice balls hurt, and Arya remembers well the welts that formed even through all the padding of her gloves and winter cloak and robes. For all the pain she has gone through since, she wishes she could step back in time to those simpler days, and take a good, cold bruising. Then she’d hold Theon’s head in a snow-bank until he begged, with the aid of Robb or Jon.   

Snow reminds her most of Jon.

Sitting in the quiet, staying up late, staring out the diamond-paned glass windows until their breath fogged up the glass and they could see nothing, waiting for the first sign of snow. …So they would know to be the first to wake up for it, to play before other people’s footsteps ruined it, turned the pure white blanket of it to dirty mush, or the afternoon sun crystallized it hard to ice.

_Jon would stand with me, and just see it. He could stand still, and just let it be, just let it fall._

So Arya looks up into the black sky, filled with a hundred thousand white kisses, and she smiles as they catch her cheeks, and blur her vision.

Because of the moonlight, she can see the flakes as they fall. They fall so slowly, it as if time stands still. It as if a sky of shooting stars is here, in this meadow, on display just for her, and only Arya can touch them, taste them, hold them. The memory is her’s alone. _Memories, no one can take from me_ , Arya vows.

Arya sticks out her tongue to catch just one or two snowflakes.

She loves the taste of snow.

 _But I don’t want to get cold_ , so Arya closes her mouth, but her head remains upturned to the weather, and she just smiles.

The grey-flecked mare she rides does not have a care for the snow it would seem, alas.  The four year-old horse whinnies in agitation, wishing its rider to allow it to move on to the shelter of trees.

Arya sighs, and gives the horses’ reigns a light tug in the right direction. The disenchanted creature is more than willing to oblige.

 _It’s warm within the trees_ , Arya notes, rather dumbly.

The bodies of the trees within the forest seem to give off their own heat, so that snow melts at their base, but the snow had just started falling, and the broad canopy above keeps out most of all the white weather.

_…That, and most of the moonlight._

Arya bites her lip, and her eyes travel back and forth. Travelling by night isn’t really necessary. It is dangerous to travel without light. One could fall by way of a branch one did not see, or the horse could catch its leg, or there could be an uneven way.

With her ability to be faceless, Arya could certainly travel openly on the King’s Road. She’d slept without issue in taverns, beyond questionable linens. Not that Arya Stark cared much about the luxury of clean linens anymore.

 _A forest is the cleaner_ , Arya would wryly smile if any could see her through the dark.

Maybe sleeping with root for a pillow reminded Arya better of who she was before entering into the House of Black and White. Yes, those days she had been cold, and wet and hungry, and frightened, weak, and pathetic, yes, but she’d had a purpose.

 _I was trying to keep my pack alive_ , Arya recalls briefly Hot Pie and Gendry. _I was trying to go home._

 _'And bind my hair with grass/ I would be your forest lass_ ’ Tom Sevenstring’s stupid ballad comes back to haunt Arya. Without the intention of remembering anything else that befell her before or after Acorn Hall, Arya pauses. She wishes she could stop remembering things she doesn’t want to remember.

Now she is anything but weak and pathetic, and Arya isn’t frightened by the storm that may come, or any of the nightmares that bind her to the girl she was before.

 _There is no going home,_ Arya Stark now knows. _There never was._

The forest floor is home now, so Arya ties up her grey mare, and then pulls out a heavy grey wool blanket from the saddlebag. She breaks off some green pine branches, shakes them off, and then lays them out on the forest floor. Over these she tosses the grey blanket. The pine will keep the morning condensation from the blanket. Over her little lair, she makes a tent out of more like branches, to keep off a wind, if one will come.

There is no wind now, but waking up after only an hour of sleep to find one’s self freezing because a wind has risen is an annoyance Arya has had the experience to prefer to avoid through a little extra labour.

Then Arya hesitates for a moment, for nowhere is safe in a country at war with itself.

But _this little nook of the forest is far from the main road. And the snow will keep Riverlands robbers, outlaws, and bandits from wandering around much, most like._

She is thinking about lighting a fire. Nothing is more homely than a fire and snow fall.

The temptation is too strong.

Arya knows she is not doing the smartest thing, still she kicks around with her feet to find a few stones, which she dredges up until her nails feel thick and uncomfortable with dirt. She instills her rocks into a little circle.

Then Arya goes to her saddlebag for a few dry pieces of wood she has kept there. The mare whinnies gratefully as she pulls them out, along with a flint, and a few small scraps of dried linchen moss, perfect for keeping a spark.

A much-determined Arya settles down into the art of a lighting a fire.

She would insist she had always been better at this than any of her brothers. They had always insisted, stubbornly, on a pyramid method for fire starting, leaning branches one against one another upwards in a three-pointed circle. That was fine and well with dry wood, but green wood one was more like to find in the wood? That would smoke itself out before it ever got going.

Arya lays two pieces of the dry wood from her saddle bag close together a little ways over the linchen but with most of the dried moss in the space between them. Then she strikes the space with her flint and watches the spark hit the the greyish-brown linchen. It smokes, so she gives it a delicate breath. Thus the starter bit sparks into life, and the resultant small flame-burst is more than welcomed by her appreciative eyes.

Arya gives light but long and steady breaths, blowing the flames under the dry wood. When the wood is heated and starts taking to light, she cracks another dry branch in half, and places these two bits of wood criss-cross atop the two lighted pieces already on her small campfire. When these are taking to light of their own accord, smoking and the air around them turning silvery, Arya gets up to break off a few thicker pine branches, and she hauls anything dry up from the forest floor that she can find, like hollowed dead wood, and a pine cone or two that is not overly wet.

_A wet fire flames, but it does not get hot._

_The Northern Lords are wet wood to fire_ , Arya decides out of nowhere, tending her little fire, _green wood, and full of smoke._ Arya takes more care with the green wood, blowing on it steadily as she warms her hands over the resultant fire. Green wood is tricky, it will spark and start and burn brilliantly one moment, then sputter and smoke itself out the next. _I hope Jon finds a way to dry the fear from them, before the next war comes._ For Arya knows there will be another war.

Such thoughts should be no comfort for a weary soul, but Arya sleeps like a baby. She dreams she is back in her childhood bed at Winterfell, with Sansa snoring softly in the same room. When Arya wakes, she could swear she has heard wolves howling through the silent, snowy night, and among the sound of them, Nymeria.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

_Nymeria is howling._

_…But that would be the dream then, wouldn’t it?_

Waking, Arya rubs the back of her neck, and stretches until a small stone finds the base of her elbow. She is about to roll to sit up when a twig snaps to the far left of her.

Arya snaps her head to the sound, her eyes instantly adjusting to the bright, white, snow-sheen enhanced light through her pine lean-to shelter.

As she does so an arrow twangs neatly past her head, and lands a short space from her hand. This has flown from the right.

_So the twig was purposeful, to announce their arrival…and to distract me. Great work Arya._

Now Arya knows that there is more than one man in her little space of the forest.

If not for the arrow, Arya would be up on her feet. Needle is attached to her belt, and hidden close under her clothes, and experience dictates she uphold her hands and turn slowly. The accuracy of the archer means that if the man wanted her dead, he could have already ended her life.

“Careful, lad. Nice and slow,” the Archer warns, although, with Arya, there is no need for this. She edges forward on her knees, and does as she is told.

But as she does so, she laughs. The laugh is a horrible, but wretchedly memorable sound.

The archer all but lowers his bow, and moves several unguarded paces forward.

“Anguy?” Arya continues to laugh.

 _It seems that the God of Death has not forsaken me, as I had forsaken Him,_ Arya thinks to herself, as she allows that laugh to die into a sly smirk. _I’ve found the Brotherhood Without Banners, and I didn’t even have to…_

“Fuck, it’s you!” another deeper, more recognizable voice barks across the space of the still wood camp that Arya had chosen without much attendance to her prayers to the God of Death.

All is contained within the space of that mad, tortured laugh.

Arya rips her head to turn towards the sound of the voice. _Anguy’s skill with the bow be damned. When the dead speak to you, you answer._ For Arya knows him before she sees him: _The Hound._

Arya meets Sandor Clegane’s momentarily unguarded, surprised, and frankly open stare, with a shocked, but steely gaze of her own.

“And you.”

“You’re not fuckin’ dead.”

“Nor you, it seems.” Arya blinks, and decides to take in her surroundings.

Anguy, the Stormlands man from the Dornish marshes, continues to stare at her dumbly, having never expected to see Arya Stark alive again. Nonetheless, he has recovered enough from the initial shock to hold his bow gamely enough once more. But there is a playful, respectful challenge in the way he grips the longbow, that while Arya knows that he knows that she knows that she should not run for it, she also knows he knows that she knows he would not try to take her down even if she did. Arya’s eyes narrow.

Anguy’s beard had grown in a bit since Arya saw him last. This was like done by the lad to cover the lean, but hardened lines of what should have been a youthful, merry face in another lifetime. The sleeve of his drab brown thigh-length tunic, under his quilted olive side-slitted surcoat and lightly studded brown leather archer’s armour, is lightly dusted with snow at the shoulder. _So they’ve been out but shortly this morning. What a lucky find I am._ His hot, shocked breath is fogging up the air.

 _He has grown up_. Arya remembers her lessons with the bow under his tutelage, when she had almost admired the young man. He had been the one nearest to Gendry and her in age. He had feigned a friendship, but she’d always known he was but her gaoler.

Her eyes then take up every other cloud of breath in that bit of over-crowded forest. She closes her eyes, and she swears she can almost hear their separate heartbeats, and differentiate between their individual indrawn and exhaled breaths. The snow makes human scent all the more clearer. Sweat, blood, what some men ate for supper last night.

 _Five men_ , Arya counts, putting the Waif’s training to good use. _Three behind the trees to the right, one beside the Hound to the left._

“It’s a lass?” One of them, whose voice Arya does not recognize, gives his position away, not that she hadn’t already made his placement out, due the scent of rabbit coming off him.

“It is the sister to the King in the North,” Anguy announces, formally, and with patience. “The lost little Stark sister of King Jon Snow.”

“Well fuck me,” the rabbit-reeking one swears.

“Are you sure Anguy?” another teases, and this time Arya recognizes the voice of Tom. _Tom Sevenstrings. Another man I have to kill._ Arya sighs wearily “Is it really that little girl you let give you the slip?”

“It ‘tis,” Anguy gives Arya a rueful smile, and she will not forgive him, not now, not ever.

Arya turns her disrespectful gaze back to the Hound. “I’m not really surprised all that much when I think about it.”

“About what?” Sandor is noting the changes in Arya, as she is taking stock of his scars. There are the ones she reckons he should have, and the ones that are new… _Those additional to those that the Tarth woman with a Lannister blade had given to him._

“You being alive. I mean,” Arya is still on her knees, with palms open to show that she bears no blade. “What with the company you keep.”

Clegane shrugs. “If you mean Thoros and Lord Beric, guess again girl. You only left me for dead. I didn’t fucking die.”

Arya wonders why he is with them. The Hound serving with the Brotherhood Without Banners is a joke played over a farce of a company, one that she’d already laughed at, and spit upon.

She returns her attention to Anguy. “Not that I am not dangerous, but I’d like to kill Lord Beric before I kill any of you, so can I get up now?”

The men still hiding in the forest shadows laugh mightily at that, but Anguy, Clegane, and Lem are not among those who lightly mock.

Anguy winces.

Clegane almost smirks at her bravado.

Tom Sevenstrings regards the face of Arya Stark studiously, like a merchant who trades wares for wares, looking for cracks, taking stock of her current worth to their little band.

“Forgive me, my Lady,” Anguy shoulders his bow, and strides the rest of the ways towards Arya, reaching out, and having done her the courtesy of not having laughed with the rest of them, his intention is obviously to help her to her feet, but the Hound growls out a warning to him:

“She has a blade under her clothes!”

Arya smiles prettily then to Anguy, who has to look back and forth between her and Clegane to believe it.

“It is a Bravossi thing, easy to conceal but still sharp enough to poke you full o’ holes, man. Believe me,” the Hound is saying, “I saw Eddard Stark’s little darling girl do in one of the Bloody Mummers that way.”

Anguy searches the proud, unlined brow of the girl, and takes in the dark eyes of Arya Stark, searching for the truth to what is, obviously, quite the tale. For men like Anguy, it would be more a boast, but for a Lord’s daughter, even one as wild as this one... Alas, Anguy only sees his own reflection there in them, before the Northern girl blinks, and her thick lashes push back and erase any hopes of knowing if his brother-at-arms jests.

“You can keep your sword, my Lady,” Anguy bows instead. Arya rises to her feet. “We go North now, to swear service to your brother in his war. You need not fear us.” The girl all but bares her teeth at that, but Anguy figures that her distrust is well deserved. “We will escort you to Winterfell, if you allow.”

“I remember being in your escort before Anguy,” she says. “I did not like it much, if you recall.”

“-The girl seems to be doing well enough, having survived this long on her own,” Sandor Clegane cuts in. _To his credit_ , Arya thinks.  

“When did you not roll over and play dead for gold, Hound?” asks the man that Arya is now calling _Rabbit Stew_ in her head. _He is an idiot_ , Arya decides. “Afraid now, of the bite of little wolf pup?”

“Your brother and sister are at Winterfell and-” Anguy all but begs.

“-Where she’ll tell them to to hang us all as soon as they open and get her through the gate,” the Hound intones honestly, not quite under his breath.

 “-I know,” Arya responds haughtily.

Anguy seems shocked that she would know that, and still be here.

“What, do you honestly think that I have been hiding in the woods all this time and that’s why no one has found me and dragged me to this Lord to be ransomed or that Lord to be raped and wed?!” Arya raises a mocking eyebrow. “And you think that, but still think I was only stupid enough to have lit a fire last night?” Her eyes leave Anguy’s to look in Tom Sevenstring’s direction. Arya cannot see him, but she knows he is there. “You can’t be that piss stupid. By the way, where is your piss-cloak friend?”

“She doesn’t talk much like a lady,” the quieter one still in the shadows speaks at last.

“Anguy! Just shut up and make her come. Lord Beric can talk some sense into her,” Rabbit-Stew advises sagely.

Anguy ignores them all pointedly. “You know what we are, and what we do, my Lady.” He knows that their making drawn-out polite conversation in a forest camp is absurd. “I will not dance around, and deny that your word for our safety would be much appreciated given that we are headed North to seek an audience with your half-brother, and there, would much appreciate not being hung from Winterfell’s walls before we get the chance to swear our swords to him.”

 _What, Anguy, are you going to get down one knee, and swear your bow to protect and serve me now, until you can do that same for Jon?!_ Arya berates the Stormlands archer in her head. _Why Jon and not Robb? And why not the King or my father? When it is only now that you’ve run out of people to rob, when the only ones left alive who will pay your ransoms are more like to betray and hang you for the effort, that you will bend a knee? Can it be that you are tired of pretending to be protecting the people, when you are really just a bunch of thugs, and bullies on the road, playing games like children?_

“If Jon needs your swords, he will have them, whether I ask him to hang you or not,” Arya admits tiredly. She does not know why she tells them this, once the words are out. “And I am not headed North. I am headed South.”

“S-South?” Anguy stammers, it is that unexpected.

Clegane bursts out howling: “You fucking stupid little bitch! You think you can just march into King’s Landing and poke the Mad Cunt Queen full o’ holes too, don’t you?!” From the emotionless but strained look on the girl’s face, he knew that she did. “Well I’m letting you know, that’s about as fucked up a plan, as you trying to get yourself killed at the Red Wedding, girl.”

“And where is Walder Frey now?” Arya Stark hisses back at him from across the space between them. The snow has started to fall again, but no one moves.

Sandor Clegane’s eyes narrow, and his mind is working.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Arya amuses herself. “And where are the rest of the Freys? Where are the hosts of the Red Wedding now, Hound? How many names do you think I have left on my list?”

“Someone fucking cooked up Walder Frey’s sons in a fucking pie, is what I fucking think, girl. And then they fucking served his pot-pie sons up to him to fucking eat before they fucking slit his throat. That is what I fucking know,” Sandor Clegane searches Arya’s eyes before he laughs. “Whoever did that is fucking crazy. I don’t think you fucking did it, but…” Clegane seeks out Anguy’s eyes, and Lem’s, from the safety of the shadows. “The little bitch is fucking crazy enough. My vote is to leave her to the fucking wolves. I know what Beric and Thoros will fucking want, but Beric and Thoros are fucking crazy too.”

“It’s fucking cold out!” calls out Rabbit-Stew. “Can you little bitches fucking hurry it up?”

“There’s a fucking Lady here, so mind your fucking language!” Anguy hollers back at Rabbit-Stew and then looks back to Arya apologetically, as if the Hound is beyond all hope. “Sorry, my Lady.”

 _Wolves? What wolves?_ wonders Arya. _The Bolton and Frey men on the run? Or the pack of real wolves travellers are telling tales of in the taverns?_ Arya wants to know.

“I would have you read your Brother’s raven first,” Anguy entreats with her. “Maybe you think you would serve your family best by whatever mission it is you mean to undertake, but it is my humble, common-man’s opinion, that you would better serve your brother by going with us to Winterfell.”

 _Common-man’s opinion_ , Arya rails inwardly, as if Anguy is referencing Gendry to her. _These men were his brothers. The brothers he chose over me, and they gave him to a witch for coin. If that was common for common men…._ As if Arya’s thoughts are a magic of their own, Anguy continues, “The Red Woman has seen it, in her flames. She saw you with your brother and a sword at Winterfell-”

“-The Red Woman is camped with the Brotherhood Without Banners?” Arya interrupts him excitedly, a manic light lit in her cold, dark eyes. “With Thoros, and Beric Dondarrion?”

“Yes, Lady Stark.”

At that Arya, freezes.

 _See, no one calls Sansa Lady Stark_ , Arya minds the realization randomly. _My sister always wanted to be a great, romantic Southern lady with stories told about her… And now she is, but a tragic one._

 _…She is Lady of Winterfell, but she is not Lady Stark._ The realization burns Arya: _I am._

“I would see your Priest, and your Leader, Anguy, and I then would see your red witch.”

Anguy’s eyes warm with a genuine smile, and thus Arya hates him the more, for she is distracted by his teeth and his lips for a second, and she curses herself because she knows that she would like him for that easy smile, and his skill with the bow, when still she hates him for the faithless hypocrite, and treacherous coward he is. “You will see your brother’s raven?”

“I will see all,” Arya allows. She starts to follow Anguy, but then she remembers her sorry excuse for a mount. “My mare-“ she begins.

“You will not need the horse where we are going, Lady Stark,” Anguy admits cautiously, familiar with Arya’s temperament. “My men have already seen to it.”

Arya stops short. “-So you are stealing my horse?”

“Appropriating it for the Brotherhood, my Lady,” Anguy knows he is about to lose what agreement the two of them had between them so he rushes to cut her off before she can assume any worse of him or the Brotherhood Without Banners. “But Lord Beric will return to you a finer beast for it, in trade, if you would but see your brother’s raven, then decide your course. I swear to you, on R’hollar, the Lord of Light.”

“A lady’s mount will be of no use to me if I decide my course is South,” Arya grumbles under her breath.

“A fuckin’ war horse, or an outlaw nag will be no fucking use to you if you decide to head South,” the Hound gives her his advice, then smiles sweetly to her, and the courtly-styled smile makes his scarred face all the uglier, “your ladyship.”

 _You would be m’lady’ Gendry did warn me. I hadn’t understood him then, or I hadn’t wanted to at least, but he was always honest with me. I am what I am. What others have made me, or make me. But still I am what I choose to be. So am I choosing to be Lady Stark, by letting Anguy acknowledge me as my father’s heir?_ she wonders.

“You call Ladies, ‘my lady’ Anguy,” Tom Sevenstrings corrects Anguy, coming forward out of the shadows as Anguy leads Arya to him. “And princesses are ‘your highness’. Your highness.” He gives Arya a bow with great flourish.

“Uh…” says Arya, to which the Hound coughs to hide the dark chuckle that the idea of Arya as a princess evidently evokes.

“Your half-brother is King in the North, now. That makes you a Princess, Arya Stark,” Tom explains, feeling that Arya considers him to be mocking her. _He might still be._ To Arya, it does not seem that Tom Sevenstrings is sure of himself. “What a song they shall sing of you, when they write songs of our days,” Tom smiles, and Arya caresses the length of needle under her clothes as the man smiles stupidly away.

When he starts to sing though:

 “The brave Brotherhood came upon her forest lair/ She laughed and mocked at them without care.”

 _I could poke him now. A gaping hole in the lungs sounds nice to me_ , thinks Arya.

 “…So they wondered then, what might be the snare?/ But her hands were lilly-white and bare/ And she wore a crown of pine needles in her hair./ These men did know the maid, despite,/ Like a Nightwatch cloak lain a’ginst the snowey white,/ Stark and North-born, sworn to warn, and guard, and right./ They met with her, and wild and dark as she was fair,/ Was Arya Stark, the Princess lost, and Winterfell heir.”/

“That is terrible,” Arya accounts to Anguy, who smiles shyly at her as she follows along with the line of them. “Do we have to listen to this? I will make him stop if you won’t.”

“This her bower, the trees, for stairs/ This her hall, the snow-banked stones, for chairs/…”

Tom Seevenstrings continues, purely for his own benefit. While he had a smooth, mellow, and hauntingly carrying voice, his song-crafting skills were predictable trope, and poorly rhymed, and his voice could not save the song.

 _He has apparently come upon his chorus,_ Arya groans inwardly.

“...This her table, the bright bold glare/ O’ her ancient royal eyes, the only heated fare.”

 “Such a hall needs no bard or minstrel, so shut your fuckin’ cunt mouth,” Clegane warns Tom, as Arya was about to. “Lords will skewer the fuckin’ minstrel that mocks them, cut off his hand or out his tongue, whichever pleases them best. And you’re about to have a fucking King, and this is his fucking sister, so guard your tongue, fool.” They continue to walk, but Sandor Clegane is not done. “…I know the Stark girl better than you all do. She is not one to forget.”

“I didn’t forget that you murdered Mycah,” Arya says quietly after a while, coming up alongside the Hound. She finds she cannot resist saying such to him, at the invitation of what he had just, so shortly ago, said. Anguy is close enough that Arya’s quiet words are not strictly private. The Archer stills as he remembers the Hound’s trial. But the Hound does not seem to be in the mood to bait.

“Funny, I forgot all about that,” the Hound mentions almost conversationally, after a while, at that exact moment when Anguy and Arya have assumed the conversation dropped. “I forget what your stupid Butcher boy even looked like. But I remember that I saved you though, and that I saved your sister, and that you still left me to die, girl. And I don’t even fucking care anymore. So let’s see, which, out of the two of us, the Gods leave the happier for it. The girl who remembers fucking stuff? Or the man who can forget the fucking shit and move on?”

Arya wants to cry but she cannot. Not with these men. Not with who she has decided to be. Instead she lifts her chin as high as she can and straightens her spine. When she finally does choose to speak, her words are steady.

“I remembered all of that, when I chose not to end your pathetic life,” Arya says hotly. “A man should remember who he is, and what he has done, or the only lord and god he serves is Death,” Arya warns the horrible scarred and hurting man who glances sidelong at her. “A girl learned that the hard way.”

“A girl…” Clegane begins, and then scoffs. “Fucking crazy.”

“A girl also learned that not all those chosen by death deserve to die,” Arya explains her beliefs further, “and that not all those who kill choose who they kill by their own choice. But Arya Stark chooses who she kills, so she cannot hide behind the name of a god, or that of some lord or prince and say ‘he told me to do it.’ A man should take the girl’s advice, before the God of Death asks for the face of Sandor Clegane.”

“Fucking Bravvos God of Death can take my fuckin’ ugly face and suck-” Sandor begins to swear but Arya cuts him off.

“The Seven, the Old Gods, Death, what have you-”

-“R’hollar,” Anguy cuts in, politely pulling back a branch that was direct in the path of Arya’s face. Arya could have ducked, or done so herself, and all this lady-this, lady-that is already beginning to eat up her nerves. But when Anguy lets the chivalrously-held branch go, almost on purpose, to fly at Clegane’s chest, Arya unclenches her teeth, and relaxes the teeth she has been grinding.

The Hound blocks the branch deftly with an elbow and clutches the bulk of the branch in his fist, to hold it back and pass it kindly to the soul behind him.

“-The God of Blood and Fire,” Arya acknowledges, “but all men must die.”

“But not all Gods bring men back to life,” Anguy murmurs. “Not all Gods are true.”

Arya smiles keenly at that. “Are they not? Should dead men be brought back to life Anguy?”

The snow is shining on the snow-covered pines, the white barked ash woods, and the leafless oak, and as the snowfall begins to get heavier, so the shine is dulled. But Anguy’s path takes them out of the open weather. They pass into another dark realm of the forest, by a path most would take for one made by deer, but Arya knows better.

Arya continues: “I think not. I think not as strongly as I think that men should not murder one another, or fight over an iron throne in South, or be jealous or covetous of what they do not have that other men or women do.”

“When you meet with Thoros and Lord Beric, bring that subject up with them,” Anguy suggests, and they walk the rest of the way in silence. “I am but a common-man. There is much I do not know. They will have the answers you are looking for, if you are looking for God, truly.”

 _Oh but I will,_ Arya plans, caressing Needle under her clothes as she is led to the men responsible for the Brotherhood Without Banners, and their Red Witch. _They will answer for what they did to me, and for what they did to Gendry._


	5. THE GIRL WITH THE SWORD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arya is taken to meet Beric Dondarrion, leader of the Brotherhood Without Banners. While there she catches up with the Hound, and Beric shows her Jon's message.
> 
> Arya reads Jon's message, and makes a decision. Then she confronts Melisandre and about Gendry, and learns that Gendry is alive and also that he is Robert Baratheon's Bastard, and that Jon, Gendry and Arya are part of one of Melisandre's crazy prophecies.

**ARYA**

**(Camped With the Brotherhood Without Banners)**

 

 

“So no need for blindfolds this time?” Arya mocks Anguy.

“No, your highness, we make an open honest way of it now. No need to hide the place we will move from before noon. By your leave of course. Lord Beric will give you time to decide, I dare say.”

Arya says nothing but surveys where she is being led. The falling snow is still light, but the midmorning sun quickly melts off the flakes, and drops of water soon fall from the pines. She could count the ones that stick with greater ease, than she could count the freckles that dot the bridge of the young archer’s nose. _I hate his freckles,_ Arya thinks.

“And if your dare pays off, and I agree to go with you, we will all ride forth under the banner of House Stark?” Arya scoffs, unable to keep quiet.

The Dornish man smiles again shyly, doing his best to keep the mischief from his merry green eyes. “I suppose so, your Highness. The banner of Arya Stark leastways, to get all us wanted and unwelcome men safely tucked into Winterfell.”

When Arya glares at him for this, Anguy relents, and says, rather solemnly: “It will be a direwolf all the same, so we go into battle against the King.”

“The King?” Arya looks to Tom Sevenstrings and the Hound, and even to the Quiet-Man, Breathing-too-Heavy, and Rabbit-Stew, but the Hound smirks, Tom shrugs, and Rabbit-Stew is picking his nose. “The King is Dead. Joffrey, praise any and every God you will, is dead, and Tommen is dead. Stannis is dead.” Arya’s voice, in her irritation, is getting quieter, and steadier. She stops walking. “Renly is dead. My brother,” Arya’s voice catches, “Robb is dead. There is only the Mad Queen and the Dragon Queen for the King In the North to defeat. So what King does Beric mean, Anguy?”

She wonders wildly for a moment if the outlaws have news she does not. _A marriage for Cersei or the Tagaryen woman? Another fool claimant ready to soak Westeros in blood and betrayal for naught? What does Beric know of this that a girl does not? Did his priest or witch raise some other foe of mine from the dead? If these bastards will dare write again, a name I’ve crossed from my list, and my prayers, then I will-_

The Archer shakes his head, and seeing the stubborn lass will go no further, he places the butt of his bow to the ground, leans upon it, and pauses to explain.

“Not Beric, your Highness, but your brother, The King.” Seeing that this still does not kindle a light of recognition in her intelligent, dark, but woefully blank eyes, Anguy permits himself to add the name, which might still be foreign for a True-born daughter of House Stark. “Jon Snow.”

Arya blinks. _That does not answer my question. That does not make sense._ The two thoughts compete in her mind simultaneously.

“It is he that sent us the raven,” Anguy explains. “He seeks any man willing to fight, willing to stand watch.” When the lass still makes no move he sighs. “It is come by the raven he sent us, milady, your Highness I mean. Forgive me.”

“If you believe the madness that’s in it, you’ll go with us, girl,” the Hound echoes. “I believe insanity runs in your fucking family,” he shrugs past Arya, as if the words he speaks are more for himself than her own ears, “as violence fucking runs in mine.”

“What madness?” Arya wonders of Anguy, trodding now well along.

“See the raven, your highness,” Tom Sevenstrings speaks forebodingly, and finally, as if no other protests from the captive they are trying to woo will be entertained. “Then perhaps you can tell us if it is madness or not. Lord Beric and the Red Woman believe it. That is enough for me, but there are those among my brothers who grumble that we leave the safety and sure provision of the woods for children’s tales.”

“What provision is sure now that winter is come?” Arya is confused.

Anguy nods approvingly, and smiles encouragingly at Arya as she looks to him. She’d smash in his face if doing so would make him stop nodding along to her like a bright fool, as if she were a child learning to tie a leather for her shoestrings, and he was proud of her for it. She could no more reckon what they meant than she could control the heat of her anger. It warms her. She can see her breath; still, Arya Stark is fire.

“Aye, and that there is it,” Tom’s eyes sparkle. “So, if what is there in the message is enough for you, then it will be good enough for those newer come to our band as well. So not only will you prove a white flag for us, come Northern roads and ways, and protection from the noose, but from our own as well.”

“I will ask my brother to hang you,” Arya eyes sparkle evilly back at Tom’s. “And I would ask him not to do it from a height, so I could watch you dance instead of sing.”

“Aye, but you said King Snow will have us, if he wants us, no matter what you say, Princess.”

“Aye,” echoes Arya almost mournfully, as Anguy whistles like a bird, and looks up.

“Most men don’t look up,” Anguy beams cheerfully in explanation to the wild, but haughty girl with the pretty heat in her cheeks who reminds him of a home he will never see again. His lean frame is puffed in the chest, almost with pride, as two of the brotherhood men acting as look-outs from up in the trees give out similar calls, and the hunting party is welcomed with a fair hurrah into Beric Dondarrion’s current camp.

Arya is marched by Anguy straight to Lord Beric himself. Thus Beric Dondarrion congratulates his merry band of outlaws, after speaking aside pleasantly, in calm surprise, with the archer:

“So you all went out for rabbit, and you came back with the last full-blooded Stark that hasn’t ruined herself? I’d say you did well.”

Aside to Arya: “I would welcome you to warm yourself at our fires, your Highness,” Beric welcomes his captive guest, “for winter has come, and I would rightly assume that our honored lady guest is cold.”

“She is not,” Arya glares at him, still caressing Needle through her clothes. “She is a Stark, and we always said winter would come.”

“And you?” Lord Beric leans into her glare.

“And I?” wonders Arya. “I am ready. _This_ is not cold.”

“Aye,” Lord Beric laughs. “Not as cold as offended Stark eyes, to be sure. And not as cold as the dead of winter come. But lighten your soul, child, for you are too young to have ever seen a true day of winter, and know not of what you speak. Yet.”

Then it seems he has dismissed her to join his men. They gather around him, and a big open bonfire that has been lit in what was, once, a big open farm field.

Smaller fires had been lit, and the smoke of those still lingers in the air but the larger one burns still, as if the Brotherhood Without Banners had been celebrating the snowfall of the night before just as Arya had.

Her eyes burn into the back of Beric Dondarrion, but the man does not turn or issue care.

Tents are pegged in the clearing that may once have sprouted turnips, and there are horses, some of them decent horse flesh as well, grazing the edges of land which was once well fended from animals.

 _What crops once grew here, where are the farmers…_ are questions that come unbidden to Arya, who just as quickly suppresses such thoughts. _I do not want to know._

As quick as she can move her mind, Arya cannot control the ideas and feelings that come unbidden. She can, however, redirect her thoughts. She is very good at this. _Boots_ , Arya thinks. _Rabbit Stew has nice boots._

Snow lightly covers the ground. All of Beric’s men though, have solid leather boots, stolen, or paid for in the coin of outlaws’ road taxes. _Every highwayman is a tax collector these days. Nice clothes too,_ Arya observes coolly.

They are clothed for the trek North, and are dressed as Northerners are wont to in Winter.

Although Arya’s full-sleeved grey, quilted linen, cotton padded doublet, and short-sleeved woven black leather tunic is afforded also by way of theft—after a manner—such was _bought by the blood of my enemies_ , so Arya assures herself of her superiority to these men. _A more noble price than the cowardly robber pays, who strips the meagre purses of those who come this way North seeking refuge from my house,_ Arya is resentfully inclined to believe.

The gold she had stolen from the Freys was originally from Casterly Rock. Thus while Arya often fantasized of melting what purse she’d made off with, and then, had imagined her feelings of satisfaction upon pouring such down Cersei Lannister’s throat, Arya allows, outfitting herself for the trek South had ultimately been a more practical use for the Freys’ blood money.

“Drink this,” Sandor Clegane presses a mug of ale into Arya’s cold fingers, “and lighten the fuck up.” The scar on the side of his face makes him look fierce, but there is a softness in his eyes, that has no right to be there when standing next to the person who wanted to kill him, and left him for dead because that had been the only thing worse than killing him she could do. “You wanted to go home. Now you’re going.”

“Not as a Beric Dondarrion’s hostage,” Arya glares at him, then eyes the vessel suspiciously. “Did you poison it?” She didn’t really think that he had of course, but speaks simply to antagonize.

“Are you going to drink it and wish I would put out of your misery afterwards? Only if you drink-“ he eyes her padded, but obviously lithe frame “-more than five of them girl.” Clegane chugs back his own mug. “You know, I would only kill you out of mercy,” he adds.

“Or if your prince or king tells you to,” Arya spits. “Even you think it wrong.”

“I know where the heart is,” the Hound smiles at her wickedly for a moment, but the expression, he cannot seem to hold it.

“Who made you my cupbearer?” Arya complains sullenly, feeling uncomfortable with whatever façade it is the man beside her cannot seem to uphold. In charity to that, she follows the larger man to the large bonfire, where the each of them take a seat on a large stone.

Sandor Clegane grates his teeth, but then rubs his mouth with the back of his hand. “The men are afraid of you.”

“Because I revenged my House upon the Freys?”

“Because you’re a fucking dead Lord’s daughter, and the King’s sister, you deluded bitch.” He laughs. Seeing the girl look about at the men around them, easily impressed as they are by whispers that she is blood to the King, and a lost heir to Winterfell, he adds: “Obviously they are about half as smart as your sister, and think that every tale and song they’ve ever heard about knights and ladies is true.”

At this, Arya laughs.

It is a true laugh, high and clear, and burrowed deep, and bounding to the core of her, and shaking even her soul, causes her to inelegantly spill some of the contents of her cup on her dress.

On linen, it would be a mess. On silk, a tragedy. On the leather and dark cotton of Arya’s clothes, it goes almost entirely unnoticeable. This is what Arya takes note of. That, and of how many men Beric has. _So many faces. So easy to go faceless._

Not at how startled Sandor Clegane is made by the sound of her laugh. “Princesses in stories don’t spill ale on themselves.”

“I don’t think I heard them sing of a Princess drinking ale,” accounts Clegane soberly.

“Or of her eating chickens,” Arya eyes the Hound up and down, and then the pair of them smile together at the memory. “The Lady Sansa wouldn’t like her stories ruined by, by chickens, or by sloppy, drunk princesses.”

Interrupting the private conversation, Lord Beric settles himself down on the other side of Arya on another large stone near the fire. “I apologize, your Highness, but I haven’t any arbor gold.” The stones keep the heat of the fire, and keep the cool and damp of the ground far from the bulk of a person’s clothes.

“Do I look like I have been drinking arbor gold and snacking on lemon cakes, Lord Beric?” Arya asks icily over the foam of her ale.

With the presence of Lord Beric, Sandor feels himself dismissed and rises to go.

“Like a dog with his tail between his legs, Hound?!” Arya is angry at him leaving, and she cannot tell now why.

“Forgive me, your Highness. I did not think-“ Beric Dondarrion is saying.

Arya does not care what his answer is. For a moment she just closes her eyes and pretends that she is in the great hall of Winterfell. There, she is stealing a sip from Jon’s cup when he is watching Alys Karstark try to flirt with Robb, and Sansa is dancing, and her father is watching her mother, and her mother is still alive and smiling, and would hit the cup out ale out of Arya’s hands if she chance saw it, and say it was the drink of the fallen, of no-goods and never-do-wells.

Arya doesn’t have to pretend to see all this beyond her eyes, playing out like a faded vision over Beric Dondarion’s face, as his words begin to etch themselves there along with her memories. “-I might not fathom what you have gone through since you left us,” Beric continues saying, “but the Lord of Light must have had a hand in it, since He brought you safe again to us.”

Arya turns to the leader of the Brotherhood Without Banners with an eyebrow raised. “And you think that would make me want to convert? The opposite is more like from that.” She blinks, almost angrily, blinded by a sudden rage that makes her think, for a moment, of throwing the cup in his face, and then grabbing a torch from the fire, and of lighting him on fire. _That would say what I think about his Lord of Light._ Instead Arya forces herself to say, “I follow the old Gods, and even them I follow lightly. Screw your Lord of Light, Beric, and screw you, and the Brotherhood, and your witch.  What of my brother’s raven?”

The older man looks amused, rather than properly frightened.

 _There are no armies left, or Lords of any strength of arms in these parts, who would willingly seek out as big a band of brigands as Beric’s got_ , Arya dully notes to herself. _That's why they can light a fire such as this...Although if the tales are true, my Uncle the Blackfish, does, upon occasion give them trouble. But now he’s gone to harass the Lannisters some more for Uncle Edmure’s sake._

“If you really could see the future, you’d know I killed Walder Frey,” Arya challenges the leader of the Brotherhood Without Banners. “And that I will kill you,” Arya continues, “based on what my brother has written.”

Lord Beric leans forward, almost conspiratorially. “I know _all_ that, Arya Stark. I also know you took your fat friend’s advice, when it came to kneading the pie crust that you baked Walder’s sons, Big Walder and Black Walder in.”

Arya’s eyes are big and incredulous.

“And I know that you smiled when you did it. The Red Woman told me to tell you that bit. Said it would make you see the truth.

“And so I am not afraid, because Thoros and the Red Woman have seen you in Winterfell, and they have seen me beyond the Wall, and that’s where they’ll burn my pyre, your Highness.” He sits back, almost contentedly. “That’s where I, at last, and for the last time, die.”

“I don’t believe in prophecies and witchcraft,” Arya rejoins. “I want to see my brother’s message. Then I want to see your Red Witch.”

“Men and women always want to know, until they do.” Beric closes his one good eye, and then stares into woods and past, due true North, there, with the black hole in his head where there was once was an eye that never grew back. He does so as if it were he, rather than his Myrish Priest and his Asshai Witch that can tell the future.

When he glances back at the Stark girl, she is unfazed, expectant, and beyond irritation, but not quite to the point of murder. “I have one of the brothers searching for it,” Lord Beric explains. “They packed up most of the camp already this morning, your highness, beyond our ale, and spare cooking utensils. When the lad finds it, he will bring it, and I will show it to you before we move. My apologies again. I did not know we would meet this day.” Again the man who was once a handsome ladies’ man at court, looks North, though no eye can see that far ahead, and Arya contemplates the physical condition of the man. “You must be very interested in what the Red Woman has foreseen for you.”

 _I can’t believe Jeyne liked him, even before the Lannister men got him. Ha, if we ever get to Winterfell, and if Jeyne made it home alive, I’ll ask Jon to marry the silly girl to_ _him_. She knows that would never happen, but.. _. Jon will find it funny_. _Jeyne Poole never was kind to Jon either._

Arya cannot help but feel resentment still, for the older girl who had always looked down on Arya and called her ‘horse-face’. Not that Arya ever cared what anyone ever thought about her looks, but she did not like those who found enjoyment in cruelty, even the cruelty of vain and stupid girls.

“Not really,” Arya kicks the rock she sits upon with her boots. “I want to ask her about my past, not my future.”

The heat from the ale goes to her fingers, and she glares at the Hound across the space of the camp, where he is caring for his horse, while she waits for Beric’s squire to bring her brother’s raven.

Edric Dayne--- _Lord Edric Dayne of Starfall_ \---Arya corrects herself, _is still squiring for Beric, apparently._

The silver-blonde hair of childhood that usually darkens with adulthood has not turned to brass or yellowed to gold on the Dorne lad, Arya observes. His wide-set violet eyes glance at her but politely, as he hands Beric Dondarrion a small sheet of parchment, wrapped in a small leather canister of sorts. Edric flashes a shy grin at Arya nonetheless, from under the drab bluish-green of his tunic sleeve, and mail.

 _I always liked Edric_ , Arya finds herself helplessly remembering, although it seems unimportant as Beric unceremoniously hands her the missive, and dismisses his squire, _but Gendry never did_.

While Arya felt she were the superior judge of men to Gendry, he had been right about her, hadn’t he?  _And my father did kill his uncle. Were it I in his place, I would want me dead._

So Arya decides then and there to dislike Edric because she did like him, and did no more these days, trust men who seemed easy to like. She scowls at the retreating figure of Lord Beric’s squire until he is at a distance, to Lord Beric’s apparent amusement, and then opens the missive.

She starts to read, but Lord Beric interrupts her.

“I forgot to ask. You do know your brother’s hand?” He raises his eyebrows quizzically, which, over the cavern of his missing eye, would likely seem a frightfully threatening gesture to most men. To Arya, the look is but absurd.

Jon and Arya had never taken lessons together. Robb, Jon, and Theon studied together under their different tutors. Arya had been with Bran, and sometimes Sansa but never with Jon. They had never needed to write in codes or send messages to communicate with one another. All it had ever taken was a look.

“I do,” she lies.

 _I know Jon’s words_ , Arya is thinking. They have always used the same words, spoken at the exact same time, finished one another’s sentences. 

“Well then, that is a relief,” Beric interrupts her again.

Arya does not even bother to hide her ire. _These bastards wanted me to read this so why won’t Beric let me?_

“Do you remember the stories they told you around the fire about winter, Arya Stark? About the North, eight thousand years ago, about the First Men? About the Children of the Forest? About Brandon the Builder? About the Others?”

Arya remembers old Nan’s tales, but to be honest, her interest had always been more in tales of dragons and warrior queens, of swordsmen, and heroes, and traveller’s geographies of places beyond the narrow sea. “Should such mean something to me?” Arya quips in a markedly aggravated tone.

“Read,” Lord Beric uses his most commanding, compelling tone.

Arya does:

‘To the outlaw, Beric Dondarion, I will grant thee pardon. Also, to Queen Cersei Lannister, I will grant thee pardon, and cede to thee forever all lands that are not in the North, so long as you may hold them against your enemies, and you will have no reason to call the Starks your enemy any longer. If you will give us freedom, we will pay thee tribute, so long as it is not unjust in sum. Northern men will bleed as your allies so long as it not your blade that bleeds them.’

 _This cannot be written by my brother Jon_ , Arya is horrified, and allows that the formal tone of the letter would be something Jon would take on if he were trying to sound like their father, but she irrationally will not accept that for any reason whatsoever Jon would ever forgive the Lannisters for what they had done to their family. _And what they will do if anyone is so stupid as to sue for peace with them. And Jon isn’t stupid_ , Arya simmers. _So it must be a forgery._

‘-and I will give my crown and the North to Queen Daenerys Tagaryen should she ask for it.’

Arya blinks, and then looks to Lord Beric for a moment.

His hideous face is shining with an abstract form of satisfaction, and he is assured by the anticipated confusion he sees there, on the Stark girl’s face.

 _Such a thing is not possible!_ Arya’s brows are knit together, and her eyes rapidly return to the missive. _Jon would not joke with his enemies, nor insult them idiotically._

‘But before I would do so, I call upon you to fight alongside me: An old enemy has come, who makes the wars and feuds we hold and wage seem petty. The dead rise, and the Night King is coming, and all the old stories are true, I swear it, or I would not debase myself to you.’

Arya clutches her throat then rubs at her temples. The words on the parchment bleed into her soul:

‘I was the Watcher on the Wall, and I saw them. And I was at Hardhome, when they came.’

‘The Wall will not hold them. The North cannot hold them. Our only hope is if we stand together. I offer you my peace, my crown, my life, if you will but stand against the Long Night that is coming for us all.’

 _That’s Jon_ , Arya is certain. _Nothing else could make him forgive the Lannisters. Nothing else would induce him to throw away the North._

‘Last, I will warn you, there will be no one left to sit on the Iron Throne, if you will not band together now. So if you refuse this call, then light your funeral pyre. For worse than death, disgrace, or any other debasement is surely coming, and I do not have the men to stop it.’

Arya sits mutely, the contents of the letter overwhelming her mind, and everything she values, holds dear, and believes is wiped clean out by the whirlwind of a distant storm.

“Winter is coming,” she says.

“Winter is already here, sweet summer child,” Lord Beric replies.

Arya laughs bitterly. _For anyone to call me a sweet summer’s child, it would have to be,_ she thinks. What she says is, “So it seems you don’t need me at all to walk into Winterfell. Why act as if you do?”

“Sharp,” Lord Beric assents, “but while you can read a Raven, I have a woman who can read our futures in flames, and the flames say you are needed in Winterfell. So you wanted to see the Red Woman?” Lord Beric asks.

“No need now,” Arya decides quickly. _I’ll kill her after I kill the Night King_.

Arya strangely accepts the news of an imminent apocalypse for mankind. Realizing she should be taking that sort of news a little bit harder, Arya contends, _my world was already over._

“Well, she would very much like still to see you,” the Red Priestess speaks from behind Arya’s left shoulder, causing Arya to spin around. “Ah, the girl with death in her eyes…I told you we would meet again.”

Melisandre of Ashai is wearing the wisps of crimson red silk, under thick red and gold brocade robes trimmed with crimson-dyed mink. Gold clasps glitter below a collar-bone left starkly bare. The red woman approaches, and a sickly heat comes off of her like an overpowering perfume. The red ruby at her throat pulses.

Arya keeps her head level. _She’s a witch_ , Arya reminds herself. _Don’t let her put any spell over you with her words._

Thus determined, Arya meets Melisandre’s hard, level, and appraising stare, and thus allows the long fingered woman’s hand to take hold of her chin.

Arya stares hard into Melisandre’s eyes, daring the Red Woman to see exactly what she is thinking.

The Red Woman stares long and hard, but then seems almost disappointed by the rather ordinary vision that pursues her deep gazes:

“Not a girl any longer, but still, I see naught but death in your eyes, Arya Stark,” the Red Woman lets Arya’s face fall away from her hand, and takes one step back, to look all of Arya, head-to-toe, over, just to make sure that whatever it is the Priestess of R’hollar is searching for, but cannot find, or finds but does not see clearly yet, is not there yet to be seen.

“Maybe that’s because I am going to kill you one day,” Arya challenges, bringing Needle idly into the open air. “Maybe today.”

Melisandre smiles. Her smile is deep and warm. “Mayhaps, one day. But not today. I have seen you wed and crowned, Arya Stark. And I was there, in Winterfell. I will sit at your wedding feast. You will be a Queen. I have seen it the flames.”

This, more than anything else the witch could have said, has Arya sure that she is a fraud or a phony.

“I think you will die today,” Arya starts towards Melisandre. She is surprised but not displeased when it seems that Lord Beric will not intervene. Arya’s mind registers that the fallen form of the Red Priestess, and a spray of blood, will make a dizzying sight against the glare of the newly fallen white of the snow.

“The girl with the sword,” Melisandre laughs, and it is a musical, bewitching sound. “Like the prophecy. But don’t kill me yet, Arya Stark! You will need me and your blacksmith both-”

Arya’s jab stops short.

“-to forge the sword that only Jon Snow can wield to defeat the Night King.”

Arya grabs Melisandre angrily by the clasp of her cloak, and the thin gold it is made of snaps in two with the force of Arya pulling the older woman towards her.

Needle is stuck just below the Red Woman’s jugular vein. The breath of the two women mingles in the cold air. The Brotherhood Without Banners seem to be pretending that they are all deaf, dumb and blind, because no one interferes with Arya threatening to kill Melisandre.

“What did you just say?” Arya warns the witch.

“You heard me,” Melisandre shrugs simply, dangerously. “Jon Snow can defeat the Night King, but only with the sword that you and Gendry Waters---or should I say, Gendry Baratheon, for I do believe the King in the North has already sent a party of his most trusted men to bring your blacksmith friend North in order to legitimize him. Only Gendry Baratheon, Jon Snow, and you, Arya Stark, can forge.”

“Whaaaat???” Arya all but falls back and sputters. _The gold cloaks were hunting a bastard named Gendry but…_

_No, but that makes sense. King Robert had a lot of bastards. And Joffrey and Tommen, and Myrcella weren’t Robert’s children, so…_

“No,” Arya says.

“Yes,” the Red Witch smiles, as if Arya is a dull but beloved child who needs coaxing.

 _Perhaps I am dull,_ Arya thinks. “So that’s why you wanted him,” Arya says.

“Yes,” Melisandre sighs. “That’s why I need you as well. The Starks are the oldest King’s line in Westeros. And I have seen it in the flames. You will be the first hero to bear forth the great sword, Lightbringer. Only you, Arya Stark. You are the girl with the sword I have seen. You, though all I see in your eyes is death, the flames do not lie, and this they have revealed to me clearly.”

“So Gendry is alive?” Arya chokes. She will not allow the witch to see how clearly flattering a prophecy that lends Arya Stark the legendary sword is in actuality to Arya Stark.

“Yes,” says Melisandre, revelling in the unshed tears gleaming in the young woman’s dark eyes.

“And Jon will let me fight,” Arya laughs, assuring herself that the end of the world does not frighten her. _Jon needs me_ , Arya realizes.

“That I do not know-” the Red Witch answers gravely.

“-That I do know,” Arya is laughing, hugging herself, almost careless of Needle.

“But you are the girl who will bear forth the sword Lightbringer,” the Red Woman prophesizes.

“Jon gave me this sword,” Arya says suddenly out of nowhere to Melisandre, playing with Needle. _So much of my life was decided by Needle,_ Arya reflects. _The gift itself, what it all meant, and getting Needle back, and not letting that go, all of that has made me who I am today. But for this blade, I could have been Sansa, or dead, or no one._

“So you shall give to him the sword that will light the world on the Long Night,” Melisandre promises, interrupting Arya’s thoughts. “Come with these men to Winterfell, and it is there the sword will be forged by these bonds you speak off.”

Ignoring Melisandre completely, and still wondering at Needle aloft in her hands, Arya hollars to Lord Beric and Anguy:

“I am going with you! I am going to Winterfell!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meant to add a Bran part but cut it out due to the length of this chapter. Finally done. Sorry for the wait!


	6. Totally Still in Progress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I finally finished Chapter five, so please read that before carrying on with this. It was posted after this.
> 
> So I stopped working on this because my father passed away and one of his last wishes was that I finish writing my own novel, which is an original work, which I have posted on my profile. It is nothing like this fanfic really but I am trying to get it done. I am super slow on it though.
> 
> I will post snippets of this chapter as I go along and then will finally rename the chapter when it is all together. Sorry. Right now it will not read well. Or if it (Gendry) bores you. I am planning for this to be a super mish-mash chapter of everyone but Arya unless length gets in the way, to get the plot moving.

Harry had stayed from his lodgings, and sent word to Willow by way of the other smiths, “that he was sorry, but it was safer for her and the lads that he keep himself well away until some trouble had sorted itself out.”

As he kept himself hidden, Harry watched and waited, and observed that no ill had fallen upon Willow and the boys. No threat had been made against them, that, in order to find his person, they be used to draw him out.

So in the end it seemed like he had over-reacted after all. Three weeks have passed and...nothing.

Willow barely raises an eyebrow, that one night, when Harry creeps out from the shadows of the room she had not thought occupied.

“Hi Will,” he says, and if she had then jumped, he does not see it.

That she is mad at him, that much he can see, and, that plainly.

“Well Harry Smith,” Willow sips her cup of heated tea elegantly. “If you had a secret you could have trusted it to me.”

“Even to torture?” Harry sits down beside her wearily, for she had but just spread out her meager supper.

Willow’s eyes scan his blazing blue countenance for a hint of exaggeration. Finding none, she makes no answer.

“I would tell you, but for that,” he assures her lamely, but it is all he offers.

Willow accepts it. “I knew you had a secret, or else you would live five times better than you do,” she sighs, “allowing poorer smiths the credit of your art. But I wonder why you stay then?”

“I have nowhere to go,” Harry accepts that in his life, that this is as good as it gets.

“That seems untrue to me. I am here because my brother dragged me here. He visited us once while you were away so that you know. He is a proper Lannister soldier now, drunk and proud of it. But you, you Harry, could go far away. Make armour for some Lord you like better.”

Harry’s face goes properly dark. “I have no love for any bloody high-born.”

“You like gold well enough,” Willow counters shrewdly. “Better than making Lannister arms, but getting paid but half for the work, I’d wager.”

“You don’t like the way we live, O high and mighty Queen of Fleabottom?”

Harry intended to insult, but Willow laughs.

“It is not my fault they call me that you know. And I am perfectly content with the way I live, for what I am I, if we are being honest, but the daughter of a whore? But-“

“As am I,” Harry insists, remembering the image of the golden woman, with hair a lot like Willow’s.

“-But you Harry,” Willow raises her voice above his dismissively, “are not content here. You think the world owes you more.”

Harry’s mouth is open to object but Willow is not done yet.

“You think there is another life for you. If so, what is to stop you from going out to get it? Is there someone you are waiting for here?”

 _No_ , Harry mentally growls at her, but all his eyes communicate is that he cannot speak, or will not.

“Do you not then think of this place as home, that you would fight for it?”

This causes Harry to reflect. _This isn’t home. There is no home for a bastard like me._ To Willow he only says:

“Trust me, you don’t want me fighting for this place. That’s a way to see it burnt to the bloody ground.”

“Well,” Willow sighs, “welcome home nonetheless Harry. The boys will be ecstatic to see you. I told them you went out on a boat and that is why you were gone, because I did not know how long it would be till they saw you again, if we ever did”

“Thank you,” Harry looks deep into her beautiful blue eyes and wonders why he does not love her more than he does.


End file.
